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SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

(I) 



SIDE LIGHTS 
ON THE ORIENT 



BY 



WALTER R. LAMBUTH 




Nashville, Tenn.; Dallas, Tex. 

Publishing House of the M. E. Church, South 

Smith & Lamar, Agents 

1 90S 






LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two CoDies Received 

FEB 18 ia09 

Copviijint tin' 

CLASS 

COPY 



;OPY B. J 



^^^\\>,^?«10 8 



Copyright, 1908, 

BY 

Smith & Lamar, Agents. 



To the children in hundreds of Methodist 
homes and parsonages who at the table and 
around the fireside have been eager listeners 
to the writer's stories of travel and adven- 
ture, these notes from the Orient are affec- 
tionately dedicated. 



FOREWORD. 

These pen sketches were made during a flying 
visit to the Far East. There has been no attempt 
at a systematic description of the countries vis- 
ited. The writer only intends to give the young 
reader a more realistic idea of the lights and shad- 
ows playing over some of the world's thorough- 
fares and bypaths; something of human need 
and God-given opportunity to meet that need. If 
it has been possible to awaken and stimulate a de- 
sire to know more about the interesting people 
who live in the lands beyond the sea, and who are 
being brought nearer to us every day, he will be 
amply rewarded for the time spent in turning 
these side lights upon the traveled way. 

Maple Terrace, Nashville, Tenn. 

(7) 



CONTENTS. 

Page. 

I. Traveling on the Roof of the Contment 13 

II. The Indian Bear Hunt 21 

III. The Greyhound of the Pacific 28 

IV. Honolulu 35 

V. Hawaii of Other Days 42 

VI. The Awakening of Hawaii 49 

VII. The Land of the Rising Sun 56 

VIII. Yokohama 63 

IX. Benkei The Giant 69 

X. Under the Mountains to Lake Biwa 76 

XI. Arima, the Crater City 83 

* XIL Outdoor Life in Korea 90 

XIII. The Streets of Seoul 96 

XIV. The Tiger Hunter 102 

XV. Country Folks 108 

XVI. The Rubber Qiurch 114 

XVII. Canal Life in China 121 

XVIII. The King of the Thieves 126 

XIX. Begging a Business 130 

XX. Straw and Bamboo 136 

XXL The Straits of Malacca 142 

XXII. Jugglers and Snake Charmers 148 

XXIII. Buddha's Tooth i54 

XXIV. Ocean Island i59 

XXV. The Roof of Asia 165 

(9) 



ILLUSTRATIONS. 

OPP. PAGK 

The Greyhound of the Pacific Frontispiece ^ 

California Volunteers' Monument 24 •- 

Coral Church 54 ^ 

Lava In Crater, Kilauea 54 

Fujiyama ^° *^ 

Ironing Clothes ^ ^ 

Bell of Miidera 72 / 

Torijigoku, Arima ^7 ^ 

Washing ^^ ^ 

Ironing ^°° 

Kim, the Tiger Hunter 104^ 

Prince of Beggars ^30^ 

Cormorant Fishing ^^o -^ 

Fishing in Straw Houses on Bamboo Poles 138 

Temple of Buddha's Tooth 158 - 

Elephant at Work • ^58 

Kin-chin- junga ^ ^ 

(II) 



I. 

TRAVELING ON THE ROOF OF THE 
CONTINENT. 

Here we are climbing up the roof of the Amer- 
ican continent! Kick a barrel of flour eastward 
from Denver, and it will roll into the Mississippi 
River. This would seem to be a long roll, but 
the incline down the eastern slope of the roof of 
the continent is so continuous that such a feat 
would almost be possible. It is a rare sensation 
to be traveling on a train in midair, running 
along at an altitude over thirty times higher than 
the tallest church steeple. Pike's Peak, in the 
Rocky Mountains, can be seen one hundred miles 
to the west of us rising into cloudland 14,147 
feet above sea level like a great sentinel of the 
mountain range which divides the East from the 
West. 

As we rush along toward Cheyenne I am re- 
minded of an incident which occurred when I 
was a boy on the way from San Francisco to 
New York. A great herd of buffalo came swing- 
ing along the plain on the left of us with a big- 
black bear trotting along behind, tongue lolling 

(13) 



14 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

out, and doing his level best to keep up. Chasing 
hard after them all were two Indians riding bare- 
back, rifle in hand, leaning forward in their eager 
desire to secure some of this big game. 

Hardly ten minutes elapsed before our con- 
ductor lost his hat by thrusting his head too 
swiftly out of the window. To the surprise and 
amusement of the circle of onlookers, his pate 
was bare and shining as if a single hair had 
never dared to grow upon the spot. An expla- 
nation and a story gave the passengers a clue to 
the conductor's embarrassment, for he had lost 
his wig as well as his hat. The year before while 
the road was under construction he and another 
railroad hand had ventured three hundred yards 
out on the plain to a spring under a big rock to 
quench their thirst. A number of Indians in am- 
bush fell upon them, killed his companion, and 
drove an arrow clear through his own body. 
Falling upon his face, the enemy supposed he was 
dead and skillfully relieved him of his back hair 
with a sharp knife, carrying his scalp away with 
them. In an hour or so our hero recovered con- 
sciousness, pulled the arrow out of his breast, 
and staggered back to the camp, where he soon 
recovered, and was promoted by the company to 
a safer and more responsible position. 

Our giant locomotive has plowed through 



ON THE ROOF OF THE CONTINENT. I5 

Echo Canyon on its way to the West. We have 
reached Ogden, in the center of a beautiful Httle 
valley, and realize that we are not far from Salt 
Lake City. This center of Mormonism is a little 
over fifty miles to the south and overlooks Salt 
Lake. Whatever we have to say about their mor- 
als and their religion (and we cannot indorse 
either one), the Mormons have been industrious 
and enterprising from the day they reached the 
shore of this great body of briny water. Out of 
nothing they have created a center of industry 
and trade which is a distributing point for hun- 
dreds of m.iles around. 

The Union Pacific Railroad formerly ran 
round the northern shore of the lake; but now 
we find our train dashing over a trestle eighteen 
miles long, built through the northern arm of the 
lake, thus saving many miles of road. As we 
stand on the rear platform and look upon this 
body of water it is difficult to realize that it is 
so dense that you can float on your back and read 
a newspaper held up in your hands ; or that while 
floating in this way an umbrella can be hoisted, 
and one can actually sail through the vv^ater like 
a boat if the breeze is strong enough. The water 
is so salty that no fish can live in it. In this re- 
spect it resembles the Dead Sea. Riding over 
the beautiful expanse of blue below us, our eyes 



l6 SIDE LIGHTS OX THE ORIENT. 

resting upon the snow-capped mountains clothed 
by the setting sun in a Hght of heavenly purple, 
it is hard to realize that on yonder receding shore 
is that plague spot of sin which has eaten its way 
into many a home and destroyed the happiness 
of many a life. I am sorry to say that the Mor- 
mons have sent their missionaries down into Ari- 
zona, that they have a colony in ]\Iexico, and that 
they are trying to extend their religion among the 
Hawaiian Islanders. 

On we go for a number of hours through the 
sagebrush of Nevada, and then begin to climb 
the Sierras, which form the eastern boundary of 
California. Two locomotives wdth labored breath 
are now pulling our heavy train, and as we rise 
to a height of five thousand feet we begin to get 
into the snow, which hangs from the branches of 
the pine trees and is piled up twelve feet deep in 
many places on both sides of the track. Once 
more we find ourselves on the rear platform look- 
ing backward through the long tunnels made by 
the snowsheds, forty-two miles in length, and 
which at great expense must be kept up in order 
to save the road from being overwhelmed by 
snowdrifts or avalanches that come sliding down 
the mountain side. A gentleman and a lady are 
sitting near us on camp stools. As the brown 
smoke fills the snowshed a curious sensation 



ox THE ROOF OF THE CONTIXEXT. ly 

comes over us. You see the outlines of the two 
figures, then only their eyes, and then they 
vanish altogether and we cannot see each other; 
but as we look up the electric light just over our 
heads seems like a far-off star in the midst of 
smoke and cloud, appearing like an eye of fire 
looking down upon us from some other world. 
Five minutes more, and the smoke clears away as 
we dash out of this snowshed among the snow 
fields. But here v;e go into another, and so on, 
up and up until the crest of the Sierra Nevada 
^lountains has been reached. At last we round 
Cape Horn and look down through our car win- 
dow on the left from our dizzy height into valleys 
far below us, where the pine trees seem only an 
inch high, and where a mountain stream has dwin- 
dled to a mere silver thread as it winds about on 
its journey to the Pacific Ocean. Down, down 
we go, almost flying over the steel rails, imtil we 
leave the dazzling snow far behind and find our- 
selves in the midst of meadows and orchards, 
where peach trees are in bloom and where cherrj^ 
blossoms make the landscape so beautiful that it 
seems as though we had passed from arctic re- 
gions into Paradise. 

Sacramento, the capital of California, is 
reached; then we steam on toward Oakland on 
the bay. reaching our destination a little after 



l8 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

dark to find Dr. C. F. Reid, Superintendent of 
our work among the Orientals on the coast, 
awaiting us. He takes us to his home^ and we 
are soon a part of the family circle gathered 
about the fireside, after enjoying a real home din- 
ner prepared by the hospitable hands of Mrs. Reid 
and Sun, her Korean cook. 

Dr. Reid went to China as a missionary in 1878 
from the Kentucky Conference. For nearly twen- 
ty years he was actively engaged in work in 
Shanghai and Soochow, where he built mission- 
ary residences and churches, and from which cen- 
ters he carried on evangelistic work along the 
canals and through the country. While associated 
together we made a tour through the country, 
when we preached from the bow of our boat and 
on the canal banks wherever the people could be 
gathered. As we returned home on the last day 
of our trip, after having preached seven or eight 
times since morning, night overtook us as we 
crossed a great stone bridge which led to a Chi- 
nese village. The villagers were out in front of 
their houses eating their simple meal, with rice 
bowl in one hand and chopsticks in the other. 

The Doctor suggested that we sing a hymn 
standing on the steps of the bridge, gather the 
crowd, and preach once more. We were too 
hoarse to try to sing, so we whistled ''J^sus, Lover 



ON THE ROOF OF THE CONTINENT. I9 

of My Soul." As the Chinese do not know how 
to whistle, it immediately attracted attention, and 
in less time than it takes to tell it we had a con- 
gregation of over one hundred people. We both 
preached, telling the old, old story that we had 
told so many times during the day, and went on 
our way, thankful that we had one more opportu- 
nity to point these simple-hearted people to the 
Way that leads to God. 

In 1898 Dr. Reid went to Korea with Bishop 
E. R. Hendrix, and there they opened the Korea 
Mission, of which the Doctor was made superin- 
tendent, in which work he continued for a number 
of years. He now has charge of the night schools 
for Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans in Los An- 
geles, Oakland, Alameda, and San Ffancisco, Cal., 
under the Woman's Home Mission Society, which 
is doing a noble work on the coast. In the schools 
in Oakland and Alameda there are a number of 
young Japanese who are working their way 
through the State University at Berkeley. Some 
of these came from our schools in Japan and some 
were already members of our Churches around 
the Inland Sea. To minister to these young men 
is to guard them from temptation, to inspire in 
them high ideals, and to send them back to their 
native land better qualified for the great work 
that lies before them. This is an enterprise worth 



20 SIDE LIGHTS OX THE ORIENT. 

all of the time and mone}- expended upon it. and 
I take pleasure in expressing my appreciation of 
the sympathy of the good women of our Church 
and their devotion to these needy young men — a 
devotion which should inspire us all to do more 
for the homeless and friendless immigrant who 
comes to our shores. 

Over forty have been received into our Church 
through these schools during the last two years. 
In the school in Los Angeles one of the members, 
a Chinaman, in his zeal and desire to do something 
for God and his own people, is undertaking the 
support of a native missionary in China who can 
work for Christ while he makes the money with 
which to support him. 

In the same city there is the Homer Toberman 
Deaconess Home and Hospital. This is a memo- 
rial by Major Toberman for his son, Homer. 
With the gift of $6,000, to which he and his good 
wife have added other sums, a home for our dea- 
conesses has been built by Dr. Reid and a hospi- 
tal ward added which, under the Misses Elliott 
and the nurses, is doing a noble work. 



11. 

THE INDIAN BEAR HUNT. 

There stands in the grounds of the State Insti- 
tute for the Deaf and Dumb in Berkeley, Cal., 
facing the Golden Gate, out through which 
the great steamers sail for Japan and China, a 
bronze statue styled "The Indian Bear Hunt." 
It is such a wonderful piece of work that I have 
been to see it several times. A mortal combat is 
in progress between two stalwart Indians and a 
powerful grizzly bear. It is a life and death 
struggle, and illustrates the fearful odds with 
which primitive man contends when he meets 
brute force on the same level and almost single- 
handed. The group in bronze is also an illustra- 
tion of the love of offspring, even among lower 
animals, and of the fierceness with which the 
mother will fight for her young. 

The bear stands on her hind legs and grapples 
with a tall, muscular Indian, who, with tomahawk 
lifted high in air, is endeavoring to deliver a 
crushing blow upon the bear's head. She has him 
at a disadvantage In" that his arm is held like a 
vice in her jaws until one can almost see the bi- 
ceps muscle being torn in shreds from the bone, 

(21) 



22 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

and hear the crunching of the bone between her 
teeth. Her right foreleg presses the Indian's side, 
and with claws imbedded in his groin it is evi- 
dent that in another minute, if he cannot extricate 
himself, his very vitals will be torn from him. 

Prostrate upon the ground is a second Indian, 
less powerful than the first, who holds in his hand 
the leash with which her two cubs are tied. It 
was the cries of tliese captives, who were being 
dragged away, that drew the mother to the spot 
and enraged her to such a pitch that she savagely 
attacked both her enemies, holding the second In- 
dian down upon the ground with one hind foot 
and threatening the first with instant death. 

This wonderul piece of bronze is the work of 
Douglas Tilden, who is deaf and dumb. He was 
born in Chico, Cal., IMay I, i860. When five 
years of age he had scarlet fever, which left 
him unable to hear a sound. Entering the insti- 
tution in front of which we have been standing, 
he graduated in 1879, and for eight years was a 
teacher in the University of California. He then 
began his life work, having shown marked talent 
in drawing, molding, and in design. He studied 
in New York City in tlie National Academy of 
Design, became a pupil of Chopin in Paris, and 
later on Professor of Sculpture in ^lark Hopkins 
Universitv, Baltimore. 



THE INDIAN BEAR HUNT. 2^ 

Returning to California, the place of his birth, 
he was appointed by Mayor Phelan an honorary 
member of an Association for the Artistic Im- 
provement of San Francisco. His reputation 
grew into a national one, so that he was given a 
place of responsibility at the Chicago Exposition, 
and was m.ade a member of the First Internation- 
al Congress of the Deaf at the World's Fair in 
Paris. 

Profoundly interested in so remarkable an art- 
ist, I sought out his residence, near the corner of 
Twenty-Second and Webster Streets, in Oakland, 
on the morning of the sailing of our steamer 
Mongolia for the Far East. Mr. Tilden's house 
is a two-story frame in a large yard, well back 
from the street. It faces the lovely slopes, now 
covered with verdure, that belong to the range of 
hills on the east of Oakland, with a lake within 
a short distance and beyond the lake green mead- 
ows, orchards here and there with plum and 
peach trees in full bloom against the background 
of the Coast Range. It was indeed an attractive 
sight. 

In the artist's yard itself was a great pepper 
tree from Mexico. Geraniums as high as one's 
shoulder covered the yard fence. Roses clam- 
bered up the porches and peeped into the second- 
story windows ; while the palm, the pomegranate, 



24 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

and the sweet lemon tree were found here and 
there, reminding one of the soft dimate of sub- 
tropical America. 

It took two rings of the bell before there came 
a response. The visitor was ushered into a large 
hall by the lady who came to the door. He be- 
gan a rather extended explanation of his visit and 
begged pardon for the intrusion. It was some 
time before he discovered that his hostess, who 
had shown him a seat in the parlor, made no 
audible reply. Excusing herself, for she had 
swiftly discerned with her quick wit that he was 
utterly helpless, she returned in a moment with 
a pad and pencil, which was an invitation to him 
to explain his errand. His request to see Mr. 
Tilden was so coupled with a few words of sin- 
cere admiration for the artist's work that her 
heart was touched at once, and off she went to 
see if he could be found. 

Within five minutes I was politely conducted 
out of the residence by a side door to a building 
which at first seemed to be a barn, neatly weather- 
boarded and painted, but which turned out to be 
the artist's studio in a quiet corner of the back 
3^ard. He was not in ; but motioning me to a 
seat, the proud wife of a gifted husband went in 
quest of him with an eagerness and kindly spirit 
which was very grateful to a stranger. 




CALIFORNIA VOLUNTEERS' MONUMENT. 



THE INDIAN BEAR HUNT. 2$ 

The studio door opened gently, and I was face 
to face with a man of average height and rather 
slender build. The serious expression of his face 
at first glance made one feel that he might not be 
wanted, but the firm grasp of the hand and the 
friendly glance of the eye insured a cordial wel- 
come. Time enough had been given to take an 
inventory of the studio: A long rattan reclining 
chair, boxes of books and probably photographs, 
a rifle on the wall^ and above it an Indian bow 
and arrows; on the other side of the room a 
long shelf with small figures in clay of various 
sorts; above the shelf fastened to the wall an 
arm of an athlete in plaster ; near by it a leg bent 
at the knee, as though it were ready for a spring ; 
and on the other side still a torso showing the 
powerful muscles of a man's back — this also in 
plaster cast. 

For fifteen minutes with pencil and paper we 
carried on a conversation, or rather correspond- 
ence, during which I endeavored to express my 
interest in his work and at the same time made 
the request that he enable me, if possible, to se- 
cure photographs of some of the groups which 
had been shaped by his hand. 

With the greatest cordiality Mr. Tilden took 
nie into his inner studio, where models of every 
sort were to be found, including one of the three 



20 SIDE LIGI-ITS OX THE ORIENT. 

caravels in which Columbus made his voyage 
across the Atlantic. The center of the room was 
occupied by a statue of Senator White, of Cali- 
fornia. This was in clay, unfinished, and most 
interesting in that it gave one an idea of the 
process of development from the little clay model 
of the Senator, which stood on our right on a 
box, up to this gigantic figure, nearly ten feet in 
height, which the artist could reach only by stand- 
ing on a platform of boards the ends of which 
rested upon the rounds of a ladder on each side. 
I noticed that a tub of water, which did not look 
very clean, had a big brass syringe standing in 
it, with which it was evident that the dignified 
Senator got a shower bath every now and then 
at the hands of the artist. It was not so much to 
keep him clean as it was to make him soft and 
pliable to the hand of the molder. 

As we parted Mr. Douglas Tilden handed me 
a photograph of a group in bronze which stands 
in the Civic Circle of Golden Gate Park, San 
Francisco, and is entitled ''California Volunteers 
Monument." 

This work is in memory of the volunteers who 
at the peril of their lives sought to free the Island 
of Cuba from the shackles of three centuries of 
bondage under her Spanish conquerors, and is 
one of his masterpieces. If Prescott, though 



THE INDIAN BEAR HUNT. 2^ 

blind, could write 'The Conquest of Mexico;" 
Francis Parkman, 'The French Occupation of 
Canada/' in several volumes, though he could not 
read for more than five minutes at a time for 
twenty years; and Douglas Tilden, deaf and 
dumb, place himself in the front rank of the 
sculptors of our age — what might not others do 
who are in full possession of health and every 
faculty ? 



III. 

THE GREYHOUND OF THE PACIFIC. 

All on board for Japan via Honolulu at noon ! 
The great wharf was thronged with friends of the 
many passengers who were soon to turn their 
faces toward the Far East. 

Good-bys were at last said, and the great 
steamship Mongolia cast off from the wharf and 
endeavored to push out into the bay. So deep 
down does she reach in the water that she was 
found to be stuck fast in the mud, and there we 
waited until after midnight. In the early morn- 
ing, as daylight began to break upon the city, we 
were steaming toward the Golden Gate, and in a 
few hours had left the receding shores of Cali- 
fornia far behind us. 

A description of this ^'Greyhound of the Pa- 
cific" may be of interest, though words can hard- 
ly describe this floating city. She is 615 feet long. 
If stood on end by the side of the Flatiron 
Building, that wonderful sky scraper in New 
York City, the building would reach only about 
midway of the vessel. If we were to put her by 
the side of the Washington Monument in the 

(28) 



THE GREYHOUND OF THE PACIFIC. 29 

Capital of the United States, she would still reach 
nearly sixty feet above that towering structure 
of stone. Her breadth of beam is sixty-five feet, 
and it would take a tapeline fifty-one feet long 
to measure the distance from her deck to the bot- 
tom of her hold. When we climbed down in her 
engine room to look at the wonderful machinery 
and see some of the eighty-three stokers, all 
Chinamen, shoveling the coal into the great fur- 
naces, we were twenty-five feet under the water. 
The Mongolia can carry 18,000 tons of cargo. 
One can hardly credit what Is stored away in the 
capacious depths of this vessel. One of the offi- 
cers told us that on a recent voyage from China 
she had 1,200 tons of peanuts which were being 
shipped to Virginia. We now have 4.700 tons 
of cotton, ship measurement, most of which came 
from Texas and is on its way to Kobe, Japan, to 
be worked up into cotton cloth. This means that 
there are 9,400 cotton bales under the deck on 
which we walk, and that if these bales were 
worked up into cotton cloth in the Japanese mills 
and stretched out across land and sea it would 
make a white path of cloth one foot wide which 
would reach from Nashville to San Francisco, 
from there to the Hawaiian Islands, from there 
to Japan, from there to India, thence through 
the Suez Canal to Gibraltar, on to New York 



30 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

City, and from New York City to Nashville 
again. In other words, we would have woven a 
great white belt around the globe. 

The anchor of this vessel weighs seven tons, 
and each link in the chain 105 pounds. She car- 
ries on this voyage 342 first-class passengers, 66 
second-class, 724 third-class, or 1,132 in all, and 
in addition to this number 270 sailors and other 
employees, or a total of 1,402. When the most 
of these passengers are Chinese, they cook for 
them a ton of rice a day. There are four cooks 
for the first-class passengers alone. The chief 
cook is a Chinaman, and is paid more a year than 
it takes to support a missionary in China. 

The steamer was built in Camden, N. J., in 
1904, at a cost of $2,000,000. She burns 150 tons 
of coal a day, all of this being shoveled into the 
furnaces by the 83 stokers we have mentioned. 
Each day we are burning enough coal to fill 150 
wagons, and by the time we reach Japan we will 
have consumed over 2,000 tons, which would fill 
a train of wagons five miles long. 

This monster of the deep is propelled through 
the water by two great screws, one on each side, 
and she can travel nearly twenty miles an hour, 
or almost as fast as the average speed of a rail- 
road train. 

By the courtesy of the engineer a party of us 



THE GREYHOUND OF THE PACIFIC. 3 1 

were taken down into the engine room, where we 
could look closely at the four great engines and 
the tw^o enormous steel shafts which are run- 
ning the vessel. We found a telephone board 
away down in the depths of the ship connecting 
with the captain's room near the bridge at the 
highest portion of the deck. Another phone 
goes from the captain's room to the crow's-nest, 
which is a little platform up on the foremast, 
where behind a low screen a sailor stands on the 
lookout through the night. Then there are other 
phones over which the captain can speak to his 
officers in different directions, so that he has 
complete command of the vessel and can send his 
orders anywhere. The engineer showed us the 
refrigerator where forty beeves are hanging. Out 
of this we get for our breakfast and dinner the 
steaks and roasts, in addition to the ducks, chick- 
ens, turkeys, and quail, as well as fish, which are 
also stored away in another part of this immense 
ice chest. As we come back from the engine 
room we pass the barber shop, the laundry, the 
doctor's office, the pantry, the bakery, the kitchen 
and storeroom, and then on once more into the 
dining salon, where over two hundred passengers 
get their meals three times a day. 

Here is where some of the food comes from 
that we have set before us : Olives from Califor- 



32 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

nia, sugar from Cuba, pineapples from Hawaii, 
oysters from Chesapeake Bay, ice cream from 
San Francisco (frozen and carried along with 
us through the entire voyage of sixteen days), 
celery from Sacramento, oranges from Los An- 
geles, jam from London, rice from China, curry 
from India, coffee from Java, flour from Oregon, 
spices from Ceylon, and molasses from Georgia. 
Surely we have levied upon the entire globe for 
the food supply of those who are being carried 
across the Pacific Ocean. 

After a few days we begin to get acquainted 
with our passengers, finding a Japanese student 
from Harvard ; a Russian going with his family 
to Vladivostok ; a count from Belgium ; a gov- 
ernment official in charge of the wild tribes of 
the Philippine Islands just from Washington 
City; Bishop and Mrs. Cranston, from the same 
city, going to Japan ; a merchant from Louisville, 
Ky. ; a surgeon from Bristol, Tenn. ; a physician 
from Louisiana ; a Jewess from San Francisco ; 
a Hawaiian Islander, who is the editor of a pa- 
per, going to Japan ; a Hawaiian prince, a mem- 
ber of Congress, on his way back to Honolulu ; 
and missionaries of the Baptist, Presbyterian, 
Methodist, and other Churches going out to Ja- 
pan, China, Korea, India, and other parts of the 
Eastern world. 



THE GREYHOUND OF THE PACIFIC. 33 

Sunday comes, and we have preaching at 10:30 
in the social hall, Sunday school in the afternoon 
(led by Mrs. Wilbur F. Crafts, who has so often 
been to Monteagle, Tenn.), and lectures on mis- 
sions and mission fields morning and night by 
some of the eminent men who have spent most 
of their lives engaged in the work of bringing 
the world to Christ. 

I must not leave out the sports. In midocean 
one afternoon the officers and all the passengers 
assembled on the deck for recreation to be fol- 
lowed that night by a concert. The first on the 
programme in the sports was a thread and needle 
race, in which several ladies stood in line while 
an equal number of men with spools of thread 
in their hands ran down the deck as fast as they 
could and handed the spools to the ladies, who 
already had needles. Each needle was to be 
threaded, and then a race back to the starting 
point to see who would get to his place first as 
the winner of the race. This was followed by 
an egg race and then a potato race, both for the 
ladies, who were to take up an Qgg in a spoon and 
run back to the starting point, or gather up the 
potatoes that had been arranged on the deck in 
rows. 

The pillow fight was the funniest of all. A 
round pole was placed waist-high from the deck, 

3 



34 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

and two passengers astride of it, facing each 
other, pillow in hand, tried to knock each other 
off. Mattresses had been placed on the deck un- 
der the pole or spar to save a hard fall. This 
was followed by the obstacle race, where two at 
a time the competitors scrambled over poles, 
crawded through life preservers, tumbled into a 
net and then out again, and finally on their all 
fours crept through a canvas wind-sail or funnel 
which had been stretched on the deck and which 
led to the goal. The successful competitor in this 
case was the Japanese student from Harvard, 
who seemed to be as active as a cat and enjoyed 
the fun as much as any American in the crowd. 



IV. 

HONOLULU. 

Six days out from San Francisco, and we are 
approaching the Hawaiian Islands. At daybreak 
I looked out of the port of my stateroom and 
saw in the dim light Diamond Head, which is a 
promontory on the Island of Oahu. The gleam 
of light from the lighthouse standing on the 
mountain slope gave us our first welcome to Hon- 
olulu on our right. Hastily getting on deck, 1 
could just make out the Island of Molokai on 
our left. To the right, on the starboard side, we 
could easily see with the rising sun the royal 
palm trees, the cocoanut groves, the houses 
nestled back amidst the dense foliage, and the 
white surf breaking on the shore. It was a beau- 
tiful sight, and one to dwell upon with a sense of 
joyous exhilaration. Far away on the other side, 
in the somber shadow under great cliffs 3,000 feet 
high, was the little settlement where 1,100 un- 
fortunate creatures smitten with leprosy make 
their home on Molokai. The scene was one of 
entrancing light on the one hand and somber 
shadow on the other. It was one that suggested 

(35) 



36 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

life and death. And yet I am glad to say that 
everything possible is done to make comfortable 
and happy the exiles who are compelled to re- 
main in isolation — the most of them for life. 

As we steam toward the harbor we pass Wai- 
kiki with its beautiful beach and drives, on the 
shore of which we are pointed out a splendid 
hotel; and then the Aquarium, and then above 
the town of Honolulu the Punch Bowl, the ex- 
tinct crater of a volcano which once sent out its 
lava and ashes^ but has slumbered quietly for 
centuries. It is a blessed thing that it sleeps, be- 
cause at the very foot of the Punch Bowl, which 
has been so worn by the weather that it is only 
500 feet above the level of the sea, lies the city 
of Honolulu, unguarded and unsuspecting of any 
danger that may lurk in the depths of that great 
closed chimney, far down beneath which there 
may yet be smoldering the fire and the fury that 
may burst forth with destructive violence. 

Before we are allowed to go alongside the 
wharf the quarantine officer comes aboard. First 
the sailors and the crew form In line up and down 
the deck and hold up their hands as the officer 
passes along to see whether or not they have any 
symptom of fever or contagious disease. As it 
was breakfast time, the passengers were allowed 
to *go down into the saloon and sit at table while 



HONOLULU. 37 

the health officer passed up and down the dining 
hall. From their appetites one would hardly think 
there was any possibility of any sickness in the 
party or among the first-class passengers. The 
steamer is given a clean bill of health and in a 
few minutes she is alongside the wharf. 

Looking down upon the throng from the deck 
high above their heads, we see a familiar face. It 
is good to meet a true and tried friend from far- 
away America. We go down the gang plank, 
grasp his hand, and then are conducted through 
the crowd of Hawaiian Islanders, Japanese, Chi- 
nese, Koreans, Portuguese, and Americans out 
into the city, where many surprises await us. The 
first thing we see is an automobile, and there are 
many of them. This is followed by a surrey and 
then a carriage, and along the main street electric 
street cars, which travel back and forth through 
the city with the same speed as in the home land. 

We turn Into the market place, and are aston- 
ished at the varieties of fish, there being some 350 
in the waters about the Islands. Here are cocoa- 
nuts fresh from the trees, bananas, every vege- 
table that is to be found elsewhere, and in addi- 
tion the breadfruit, the lotus, and the taro. The 
breadfruit is about the size of a large pineapple 
and nearly the same shape, but is smooth and 
green on the outside. It is baked by the natives 



38 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

and serves as a healthful food. In their primi- 
tive style they cook it in a hole in the ground 
between hot stones. So much of this fruit groves 
on a single tree that it is said twenty-seven trees, 
covering an acre of land, is sufficient to support 
from ten to twelve persons eight months of the 
year. 

The taro is a root which looks something like 
a beet, but is a little longer and darker. It is 
crushed between two stones, baked, fermented, 
and then it becomes a paste, and is called pot. So 
nourishing is this and abundant that a strip of 
land not larger than a good-sized dining room 
table will support one man for a year, and one 
square mile will support some 15,000 people. 
The lotus has been brought from China, and 
originally came from India. It is also a long, 
tuberous root in sections. It grows deep down 
in the mud in the lotus ponds of Japan and Chi- 
na, and is eaten both raw and cooked by the na- 
tives. 

Passing into the middle of the town, whose 
streets are beautiful and clean and houses well 
built, we reach the government building, which 
is in the center of ground covering ten acres. In 
the right-hand corner, as we go in, is the former 
palace of Queen Liliuokalani, who was deposed 
during the revolution in Hawaii, after which the 



HONOLULU. 39 

Islands became a republic and then were annexed 
in 1898 to the United States. She lives near by 
in a beautiful home, surrounded by flowering 
trees and lovely plants, and is taken care of by 
the United States government. Entering the 
government building itself, we are ushered into 
the House of Representatives. Here we find 
thirty members of the House, the most of whom 
are coffee-colored, though some are entirely 
white, and all of whom, with one or two excep- 
tions, speak English. They are discussing the 
question of good roads and appropriations for 
the betterment of conditions in the Island terri- 
tory. The interpreter puts everything into the 
Hawaiian language, so that the representatives 
shall thoroughly understand the proceedings, and 
also for the benefit of the visiting Islanders who 
may not understand the English language. The 
Speaker of the House occupies a platform which 
was once the throne of the Queen. On the wall 
back of him are portraits of Queen Emma and 
the Queen Liho Liho, who died while on a visit 
to London, together with the King, who also lost 
his life from an attack of measles. The Island- 
ers had never encountered this simple disease, and 
when later on it broke out among them, having 
been brought by sailors, in the midst of their 
fever they would rush into the sea to get cooled 



40 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

down or bury themselves in the sand on the sea- 
shore. This checked the fever, drove in the erup- 
tion, and was the cause of the death of hundreds. 
Another portrait was that of Kamehameha I., 
who was born in 1753, reigned for many years, 
and did more for Hawaii than any other 
chief or king. The picture represents him in a 
scarlet robe over a white shirt, with a high collar 
and black cravat. He has a strong face, with a 
broad forehead, and was a man of energy, judg- 
ment, and power. 

We next visited the Aquarium, on the Waikiki 
beach. The most beautiful fish we have ever seen 
were found in the tanks along which we could 
pass and see them swimming in their native ele- 
ment. One had a blue body and fins of a canary 
yellow ; another a black body and one single blue 
spot on its side, the size of a quarter of a dollar ; 
a third had two long streamers to the upper part 
of his head, which floated behind him and which 
seemed to guide his movements; a fourth was 
possessed of a horn an inch and a half long, 
which was set between his eyes; while another, 
that looked like the sole we have in the United 
States, had two hornlike projections on his back, 
at the top of which were his eyes. One of these 
had buried himself in the sand until nothing of 
his bodv could be seen. Onlv the two little horns 



HAWAII OF OTHER DAYS. 4I 

stood Up, and at the very tips his eyes winked 
and bHnked while watching for his prey. It re- 
minded one of a submarine with two conning 
towers, in the top of which sailors were on the 
lookout for their enemy. Surely the hand of 
God has shaped and colored these wonderful 
creatures with which to beautify the underworld 
of water as much as he has those in the midst of 
which we live. 



HAWAII OF OTHER DAYS. 

The Hawaiian Islands have been called the 
Crossroads of the Pacific. They lie near the 
center of that great body of water 2,I00 miles 
from San Francisco, 2,500 miles from Alaska, 
3,400 miles from Yokohama, and over 1,000 miles 
from several groups of islands in the South Pa- 
cific. Steamers from the United States to Japan, 
to China, to the Philippines, and to Australia call 
at Honolulu on their way to and fro. The area 
of the twenty islands, large and small, is a little 
less than that of the State of New Jersey. 

Hawaii was discovered in 1778 by Captain 
Cook, who in his armed ships, the Resolution 
and the Discovery, was trying to find a North- 
west passage to Asia. Singularly enough, the 
Islanders had a tradition that their God, Lono, 
who had wandered away filled with grief after the 
murder of his wife, would some day return *'on 
an island bearing cocoanut trees, swine, and 
dogs." When Captain Cook's vessels dropped 
anchor, the tall masts looked to them like trees 
on the floating island; and it is said that they at 
once thought him to be Lono, and fell on their 
(42) 



HAWAII OF OTHER DAYS. 43 

faces, offering him gifts and sacrifices. When 
the sailors from the vessels went ashore and light- 
ed their cigars, the people thought them heaven- 
ly beings because they were able to send such 
strange fire and smoke out of their mouths, and 
their wonder was increased at the pockets in 
their coats from which they could take all man- 
ner of things from a "hole in their sides when- 
ever they wished." 

Captain Cook went on his way north, but re- 
turned in a few months, when the natives re- 
joiced more than ever. It is said that 3,,cxD0 ca- 
noes filled with Islanders went out to meet him, 
and when he came ashore 15,000 people pros- 
trated themselves on the ground and rendered 
him homage. Among other things that were 
presented to him were six beautiful feather 
cloaks of almost priceless value. The feathers 
were a delicate shade of yellow, plucked from a 
little black bird which had only one feather of 
this color on each side of his breast under the 
wings. So many of these birds were killed to 
make these cloaks, which could be worn only by 
chiefs and kings, that the little creatures were 
exterminated. Several of these cloaks can still 
be seen in the Bishop Museum, in Honolulu. In 
return for these costly gifts the king received a 
white shirt and a cutlass. 



44 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

Had Captain Cook told the people that he was 
not a divine being, it might not have cost him 
his life. He and his men treated the natives 
roughly. The death of one of his sailors made 
them realize that they were human beings like 
themselves; and when he required supplies, and 
finally demanded the king himself as a hostage, 
a native chief slipped up behind the Captain and 
stabbed him in the back. Miss Brain says in her 
very interesting book, "The Transformation of 
Hawaii :" ''The native account of the unfortu- 
nate affair says that the chief had no intention 
of killing the Captain, believing him to be im- 
mortal. When he seized him, however, he called 
for help and cried out in pain. Hearing this, the 
chief exclaimed, 'He groans ! He is not a god !' 
and at once took his life." 

In those early days the natives were idolaters 
of the grossest sort. In the museum referred to 
there is a model of a heathen temple with hideous 
images made of wood. Some of these idols were 
kept in a straw hut in one corner and others were 
set upon the wall as guardians of the place. The 
head and neck of some of these are of wicker- 
work covered with fine red feathers. "Their 
eyes were of mother-of-pearl and their great 
mouths adorned with three rows of shark's teeth 
stretched from ear to ear, and to 'their heads 



HAWAII OF OTHER DAYS. 45 

were fastened long tresses of human hair." 
There were gods of the land and gods of the 
sea. Even the shark was worshiped and kept 
in inclosures made of coral at the seashore in 
order that offerings might be thrown to him. 

The people were not only superstitious but ab- 
solutely lacking in modesty and in sense of 
shame. They wore little or no clothing. When 
the ship Thaddeus arrived with missionaries on 
board, King Liho-Liho was invited to dine with 
them. To the astonishment and confusion of the 
ladies, the King arrived attired in a "narrow 
waist girdle and green silk scarf thrown over his 
shoulders, a necklace of large beads, and a crown 
of scarlet feathers." When the missionaries were 
settled in their own home on shore, he made 
them another visit accompanied by his five wives. 
It being hinted to him that he would be more 
welcome in a different style of dress than that 
which he wore, his Majesty came the next day 
in an elaborate costume consisting of green silk 
stockings and a silk hat. 

Great reverence was felt for the chiefs. They 
were not infrequently followed by as many as 
twenty-five men and boys carrying umbrellas and 
spittoons. The latter was on account of a super- 
stition that if a chief or king were to spit on a 
chip or stone his enemy could take it and use 



46 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

it as a charm against him to bring on some 
disease or the presence of an evil spirit. 

The tab It was something practiced by the chiefs 
in order to selfishly keep food, including fish and 
fruit, for their own use, and also to give them 
a stronger hold upon the people. To violate the 
tabu was a crime punishable by death. Cocoanut 
trees were marked with the tabu; so were banana 
trees, and often so many things that it was diffi- 
cult for the common people, and especially the 
women, to get anything to eat. "During these 
periods every fire and light on the island must be 
extinguished, no canoe must be launched upon 
the water, no person must bathe, no individual 
must be seen out of doors, no dog must bark, no 
pig must grunt, no cock must crow, or the fab it 
would be broken and fail to accomplish the ob- 
ject designated." Of course it was impossible to 
keep such commands as these, and so the prop- 
erty of the subjects who broke the tabu was 
seized by the chiefs and used as their own. 

The Hawaiians were very fond of dogs. They 
regarded the flesh of the dog as sweeter than that 
of the pig. One missionary wrote home that he 
saw nearly two hundred dogs cooked at one time, 
and reported a certain royal feast where twice 
that number were baked and devoured. 

In 18 10, immediatelv after the .death of King 



HAWAII OF OTHER DAYS. 47 

Kamehameha L, whose bronze statue is seen in 
front of the government building, the tabu was 
broken all over the Islands and idolatry was dis- 
continued. The people had grown tired of this 
fearful bondage, and a priest himself led them 
in the destruction of the idols. 

These simple Islanders seem to have been pre- 
pared for the gospel. While they were lacking 
in a sense of shame and virtue, yet they were 
willing to learn, kindly in disposition, and appre- 
ciated what was done for them when they saw it 
was done in a spirit of true friendship and a 
desire to do them good. They were children of 
nature, fond of sunshine and fair weather; they 
could swim like ducks and ride the surf with 
wonderful skill as they stood upon a board and 
floated in upon the breakers which rolled over 
and over upon the beach. 

We had a splendid exhibition of their swim- 
ming ability when ten or fifteen boys, with only 
a loin cloth about them, appeared in the water 
about the steamer, their black heads bobbing up 
and down and their swarthy backs glistening in 
the sunlight. Whenever a nickel or a dime was 
tossed into the water by one of our passengers, 
down they would go, three or four at a time, and 
in less than a half minute one of them would 
come bobbing up like a cork with the coin in his 



48 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

outstretched hand, and then it would go into his 
mouth and he would at once be on the lookout 
tor another chance to add to his store. To our 
astonishment some of these little fellows came 
up on our steamer, got into the lifeboats swing- 
ing: awav above our heads, and dived otT of them 
fifty feet, headforemost, down into the sea. One 
cannot help admiring such strength and activity 
and courag'e, for it is said that at times in their 
surf-bathing they have to defend themselves from 
the shark with a stick, pointed and hardened at 
each end. which they run into his mouth, and 
thus by transfixing his jaws become masters even 
of this dread monster of the sea. 



VI. 

THE AWAKENING OF HAWAII. 

Shortly after the death of Kamehameha I. 
several missionaries of the American Board ar- 
rived. This was in the year 1820. It is ahnost 
impossible to describe the hardships they en- 
dured and the difficulties they met with. The 
people worshiped idols; there was no word for 
virtue in their language ; there was no conception 
of God ; when the Lord's Supper was commemo- 
rated by the missionaries, the natives thought the 
wine or the juice of the grape was the blood of 
human victims; when they made cellars for their 
houses, the Hawaiians thought the missionaries 
were building forts; there was no written lan- 
guage, and it was almost impossible to get the 
natives to understand the ideas of goodness, grat- 
itude, and purity which were so necessary for a 
better life. Then the missionaries had to eat 
stale food, because as yet they were unable to 
raise the food which they needed for themselves 
and children. Besides all this, there were many 
runaway sailors and low white men who were 
living a life of idleness and vice. These did a1- 
4 (49) 



50 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

most as much harm as the missionaries did good, 
and the sad part of it was that they came from 
Christian lands. As the result of months of 
prayer and diligent effort, the wife of Kameha- 
meha the Great, and the mother of two kings, 
became the first baptized convert and the first 
member of the native Hawaiian Church. King 
Liho-Liho declared himself in favor of Chris- 
tianity, and his wife became a devout Christian. 
She not only urged her people to worship the 
true God, but built the first Christian school in 
Honolulu. Another convert of an adjoining 
island was a queen who was converted at fifty 
years of age. She had been proud and cruel, 
but she became so patient and gentle and kind 
that her subjects called her the "New Kaahumu." 
She learned to read and write when she was over 
fifty, and to set her people a good example took 
her examination at the school just as they did. 
When she died, in 1832, one of the missionaries 
wrote of her as follows: "The mission has lost 
in her a mother and judicious counselor and firm 
supporter, but heaven has received a soul cleansed 
by the blood of Christ from the foul stains of 
heathenism, infanticide, and abominable pollu- 
tion." 

In 1835 R^v. Titus Coan and his wife arrived. 
He became the pastor of a Httle Church of twen- 



THE AWAKENING OF HAWAII. 5I 

ty-three members at HIlo, on the largest island. 
Nothing daunted him. He would preach to his 
people on Sunday, and then spend the week mak- 
ing difficult and dangerous journeys across the 
lava beds or along the mountain paths and into 
the valleys, eating and sleeping with the people 
and talking to them about Christ. Within two 
years the "great awakening" began, when the 
people were so stirred concerning their need of 
Christ and a better life that they crowded Mr. 
Coan's house, refusing to go away until after 
midnight. By daylight they were there again. 
This spread from village to village, and then 
they came out from the villages to Hilo until ten 
thousand people had gathered in the town for in- 
struction. For two whole years these people re- 
mained in this great camp meeting. The men 
were put to work fishing along the shore and cul- 
tivating gardens in which potatoes and taro were 
planted for food, while the women were taught 
by the missionaries' wives habits of cleanliness 
and usefulness, such as sewing, cooking, dress- 
making, and braiding straw hats. As the result 
of this work on one single day in July, 1838, con- 
verts to the number of 1705 were baptized and 
received into the Church, and the good work 
went on in the island until Titus Coan became 
pastor of the largest Church in the world, 



52 SIDE LIGHTS OX THE ORIENT. 

which at the end of five years had 7,557 mem- 
bers. 

On this same island of Hawaii is the volcano 
of Kilauea, which is the largest on the globe. It 
is 4,400 feet above the sea level, has a crater 
eight miles around, and is over 1,000 feet deep. 
At the bottom of this crater is a lake of lava, 
boiling and smoking with fires that never die 
out, and it is most appropriately called by the na- 
tives Holemaumau, "the house of everlasting 
burning." The goddess Pele was supposed to 
live in this volcano, and the fire demons that threw 
up the showers of fire and stones and brought out 
the lava were her slaves. The Hawaiians were 
dreadfully afraid of this cruel goddess, and often 
threw white chickens, fish, fruit, and dogs into 
the crater as an offering to appease her wrath. 

The ruler of this part of the main island of 
Hawaii was Kapaiolani, the daughter of a chief 
and the most famous of all the converts. When 
the missionaries first saw her, she was sitting on 
a rock anointing herself with oil. She had sev- 
eral husbands and was a hard drinker of intoxi- 
cating liquors. When she became a Christian, 
she gave up all her bad habits, dismissed all her 
husbands except one, Naiho, who promised to 
help her in her new religion. Finding that her 
people were so enslaved by their fear of Pele, 



THE AWAKENING OF HAWAII. 53 

she resolved single-handed to face the goddess 
and break the spell. Her husband tried to dis- 
suade her, and her people gathered round, pros- 
trating themselves, and begged her not to go. 
She turned a deaf ear to their entreaties and 
traveled the entire distance, one hundred miles, 
on foot across the lava beds, saying that her Heav- 
enly Father would protect her. At last eighty 
of her people determined to go with her. Over 
and over again on the way they begged her to 
return; but she kept on, and replied: 'If I am 
destroyed, you may all believe in Pele; but if I 
am not, then you must all turn to the true God." 

Upon reaching the crater she climbed down al- 
most to the very edge, where the ground trem- 
bled under her feet, and steam and smoke issued 
from the great cracks about her. Taking up a 
stone in her hand, she hurled it into the abyss 
below, and defied the goddess Pele to come out. 
Her people were so terrified that they threw 
themselves upon their faces. Turning to them, 
this noble and courageous woman said : ''J^^o^'^^'^ 
is my God. He kindled these fires. I fear no 
Pele. The gods of Hawaii are vain. Great is 
the goodness of Jehovah in sending the mission- 
aries to turn us from these vanities to the living 
God !" 

Finding that Pele did not injure her, the na- 



54 ^^ir)K LuiiiTS ON thf: orient. 

lives gathered around their princess and knek 
with her in prayer, after which they sang a Chris- 
tian hymn amid the roaring of the fires and the 
crackhng of the flames. Then she returned to 
Hilo w^ith feet bruised and sore, but rejoicing 
that God had sustained her and given strength 
and Hfe to be devoted to untiring efforts in w^in- 
ning her nation to faith in the Hving God. 

W^ith such devotion did these early Christians 
take up the work that they began the building 
of churches on all the islands. The Coral 
Church in Honolulu is one of the most interest- 
ing. When they determined to build, the men 
went out in their canoes to where the surf beats 
upon the reefs and, diving down into the sea, 
with sharpened sticks prized off great blocks of 
coral. They then returned to their boats above 
them for a breathing spell, went down once more 
with ropes, and made them fast to these blocks, 
while others in the canoes hauled them up. On 
reaching the shore the coral was carried by men, 
and sometimes by women, to the foundation of 
the church, others bringing sand and lime. Thus 
block on block the church went up until it stands 
there to-day a monument of their faith and self- 
denying effort. 

While many of the Islanders irt past years were 
brought to Christ, a change has come in the 




CORAL CHURCH. 




LAVA IN CRATER, KILAUEA. 



THR AWAKENING OF HAWAII. 55 

population. Thousands of Portuguese, Roman 
Catholics, and Chinese and Japanese Buddhists 
have come in, and not a few white men, who have 
opened saloons and subjected the simple Island- 
ers to severe temptation with the result of draw- 
ing not a few away from their early faith. The 
Church in the United States needs to be wide 
awake to this new need and great opportunity 
to help strengthen the faith of those who have 
already been reached, and to Christianize the 
tens of thousands of Asiatics who have come to 
work upon the sugar plantations. 

With this closing line we give the beautiful 
salutation of the Islanders, who, when they throw 
flowers around your neck upon the wharf before 
your steamer leaves, wave their hands and say: 
''Aloha ! Aloha !" (Love to you ! Love to you !) 



VII. 
THE LAND OF THE RISING SUN. 

Tex days out from Honolulu, and we are ap- 
proaching the Japanese coast. Already there are 
signs of land, for we have seen large masses of 
seaweed floating by. Then a snow-white gull 
has come out to meet us, and hovers gracefully 
over our steamer — a beautiful white-winged mes- 
senger. We have had it pretty rough, the sea 
sometimes in great waves towering above the 
bow and falling in tons of water upon the deck. 
But now everything is calm, and we look forward 
to our getting ashore in another day. 

On Sunday afternoon we had an interesting 
little service down between decks among the 
steerage passengers. It was a curious company, 
the congregation nearly all standing up, for there 
were no seats. Rev. D. S. Spencer, of Tokyo, 
addressed the Japanese in the congreg*ation, using 
their language, and Rev. ^Ir. Thwing, of Hon- 
olulu, the Chinese in their own tongue. While 
they were speaking I noticed one Chinaman 
crouched down in the corner on the end of a 
is6) 



THE LAND OF THE RISING SUN, 57 

plank with a long pipe in his mouth. Three of 
the sailors behind us were smoking cigarettes. 
Another Chinese sailor had a bucket of water in 
each hand, and stood there a few minutes to 
catch a part of the sermon. A great big Russian 
formed a part of the background, and several of 
the first-class passengers were with us to attend 
this novel service, where the singing was in Chi- 
nese, Japanese, and in English all at the same 
time. A retired merchant from Louisville, Ky., 
was so interested that he said it was worth travel- 
ing across the Pacific Ocean to attend such a 
meeting and to see how deeply interested some of 
the Japanese were in what was being said. He 
must have been interested himself because where 
he sat on the hatchway I could see the water drip- 
ping on his hat and once in a while a good big 
drop rolling down his neck. 

In that little group gathered around the speak- 
ers was a Japanese commission merchant about 
fifty years old, whose face had been badly pitted 
with smallpox. His hair and mustache had be- 
gun to turn gray, and he looked as if he had 
worked very hard while on the Hawaiian Islands. 
His earnestness and kindly spirit expressed them- 
selves in both his face and his dark brown eyes. 
The name of this Japanese gentleman is Mr. 
Datte, and he is so closely connected with the 



58 SIDE LIGHTS OX THE ORIENT. 

opening of our Methodist work in Japan that I 
must tell his story as he told it to me. 

Nearly thirty years ago INlr. Datte went from 
Yokohama to San Francisco to see something of 
America. When he landed he had no money and 
was obliged to find work at once. Not having 
any friends in the city who could help him, he 
crossed the bay and visited Oakland. Unable to 
get any work there, he wandered out into the 
country, and finally came across a farmer who 
gave him employment. After a few weeks he fell 
sick, and having a high fever went out one morn- 
ing with the farm hands, not to work, but to lie 
down under a tree to die. As he did not return at 
noon, the farmer's wife inquired of the hands 
where the Japanese boy was. They did not know 
and did not seem to care. The farmer and his 
wife searched for him, bore him to the house in 
an unconscious condition, and put him to bed. 
He was sick for several weeks, but they nursed 
him tenderly and he began to recover. 

The farmer was from Switzerland and was an 
earnest Christian. When young Datte was able to 
talk and had strength enough to ask questions, he 
inquired of the farmer where he had found him 
and why it was that he should have taken so 
much pains to care for a stranger. The farmer 
replied that he was a Christian and that Jesus 



THE LAND OF THE RISING SUN. 59 

Christ, whom he served, had taught him to care 
for the sick and the stranger. The young Jap- 
anese then said : "Tell me about your God." The 
man did so in simple words that the boy could 
understand. Datte listened very attentively, then 
looked up at the farmer and said: "Your God 
must be the true God. I came from Japan, and 
had no friends ; my money was out, and you gave 
me work; I became sick, and you took care of 
me as you would your own son. My mother lives 
in Japan far away ; she does not know that I am 
sick, and could not come if she did. But your 
wife has been a mother to me, and the God who 
led you to do all this for a poor sick stranger 
must be the true God." 

When young Datte recovered he made a pro- 
fession of religion, expressing his deep and abid- 
ing faith in Jesus Christ, and joined the Metho- 
dist Church. Returning to San Francisco, he 
found employment there through friends who 
had been raised up, and he soon did well. He 
joined the Japanese Y. M. C. A., and was made 
its first president, working actively in connection 
with what is called the Gospel Society. The spe- 
cial work of this society was to look after the 
friendless Japanese landing on a strange shore. 

One day while standing on the wharf just as a 
steamer from Japan had come alongside he saw 



60 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

a Japanese sailor who had come ashore and was 
looking about aimlessly. Datte introduced him- 
self, and, finding that the sailor did not know 
where to go, took him to the Gospel Society. 
There the sailor, whose name was T. Sunamoto, 
found a good supper and a clean bed. What was 
more important, it was.not long before he found 
Christ as his Saviour through the influence of 
our young friend, who was anxious to do some- 
thing to help another as he had been helped him- 
self. The sailor, who had been a pilot for a num- 
ber of years on the Japanese coast, remained in 
San Francisco, went to a night school, learned 
to speak and read English, returned to Kobe, 
Japan, after five years, and in 1886 helped us to 
found the mission of the Methodist Episcopal 
Church, South. With these facts it will not be 
wondered at that during the little service between 
the decks of the Mongolia my eyes were riveted 
upon the scarred but kindly face of this Christian 
Japanese who, led by the Spirit of God, was a 
pioneer in opening the way through another man's 
life to the hearts and homes of thousands of his 
own people. 

The last day of our voyage has come. We 
find ourselves peering into the distance for the 
first sight of land. Suddenly on our right, or over 
the starboard bow, as the sailors say, we see a line 



THE LAND OF Tllh KlhlNG SUN. 6l 

of hills with rugged cliffs here and there. Then 
in an hour, when the clouds begin to break, there 
rises Fujiyama, the peerless mountain of the 
Land of the Rising Sun. Its summit, even now, 
is sun-kissed and glorious as it glistens in the 
light reflected from the snow along its beautiful 
slopes. It is eighty miles away, but can be clearly 
seen, rising as it does 12,365 feet above the level 
of the sea. These figures can be remembered by 
the twelve months and the number of days in 
the year. 

Here and there we now see a white sail. Some 
daring fisherman has come far out from the land 
to cast his net. On the horizon are two steamers, 
one coming out from the bay and another steam- 
ing in. To the west of us is Vries Island, an 
active volcano, from which during the day smoke 
can be seen issuing and sometimes at night the 
glow of the volcanic fires thrown up against the 
clouds. 

Now we are entering Tokyo Bay, and can 
easily see on the shore, on the starboard side, the 
lighthouse which guards the rocky coast and 
beyond it the beautiful monument erected three 
years ago to the memory of Commodore Perry, 
who steamed up the bay in 1854 and landed at 
Uruwaga, near which place the monument now 
stands. Without the firing of a gun the Mikado's 



62 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

empire was opened to the outside world and to 
a Christian civiHzation through the messenger of 
peace who was sent from the United States of 
America. Thus from the beginning there has 
been a bond of friendship between these two 



VIII. 
YOKOHAMA. 

For the second time during our voyage from 
San Francisco the MongoHa has dropped anchor. 
We have come 3,400 miles from Honolulu, where 
we made our first visit, and during all that dis- 
tance, day and night, the fires have been burning 
beneath our feet, fed by the stokers out of sight, 
and the great engines have been at work in our 
service. We are glad that the engineers and fire- 
men are to have a rest for a couple of days. 

Our steamer is literally surrounded with little 
boats called "sampans." The word "sampan" 
means three boards, and comes from China. Here 
are the little Japs on every side waving their 
hands, bowing and saluting in some cases, and 
in others trying to get the Japanese passengers 
to agree to take passage ashore and go to their 
hotels. After medical inspection of the crew and 
passengers, the ladder is let down by the side of 
the ship, and up come the Japanese boatmen and 
hotel runners as though racing for life. One 
fellow falls backward into his boat, another near- 
ly tumbles overboard and is pulled up by his col- 

(63) 



64 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

lar just ill time to save him from a ducking. A 
third has a basket of greens which gets upset, 
and he loses half of his vegetables in the sea. 
There are Chinese tailors by the dozen, with sam- 
ples in hand, soliciting the European passengers 
to have a suit of clothes made. 

After a while the hubbub ceases, order is re- 
stored, good-bys are said, and we are all off for 
the wharf, where our luggage is inspected, and 
then we take jinrikishas for the station. How 
queer it is for those who ride in these little two- 
wheel pull-man cars or carriages, in the shafts of 
which is a two-legged horse who eats rice and 
fish instead of hay, goes at a fast trot and some- 
times at a breakneck pace, and is always in a 
good humor ! On our way to the station we are 
impressed by the narrow streets, the heavy tile 
roofs, the almost numberless shops, and the fre- 
quency of paper doors and windows instead of 
board or glass. Nearly every family seems to 
make something for sale. In the front of one 
house you see matches made of shavings, one 
end of the shaving being dipped in sulphur; in 
the next little sweet cakes they call ''sembe ;" then 
there follows a stocking shop ; then the next is 
one where you find beans, peas, rice, and various 
kinds of grains, but not more than about a peck 
of anv one kind ; and so on down the street. Some 



YOKOHAMA. 65 

of the shop signs seem to be pieces of wood of 
line grain but irregular shape, which have been 
dipped in the sea until barnacles have grown all 
over them. Other pieces I noticed with holes 
bored through and through by the ants. It must 
be the oddity that makes the rough sign attractive 
to them. It certainly is curious to a foreigner. 

Here is a shop where the sign is in English, 
"The Hall of Milk;" and some one says there is 
a barber shop over the door of which you will 
find these words: ''Shavings and Hair Cuttings." 
This reminds me of the bookstore in the city of 
Hiroshima, when I- lived there years ago, which 
had on it: ''Book Sellers and Students Shot 
Here." A dangerous place ! The sign painter 
had made a "t" instead of a "p" in the word 
"shop;" but as the bookseller was himself no 
wiser, it made no great difference at last. 

We reached the station and found Mr. Datte's 
wife and children there to meet him. It is a most 
interesting family. She is a substantial-looking 
lady with an intelligent face. She speaks Eng- 
lish fairly well, and tells us that one of her chil- 
dren was born in Canada and the others on the 
Hawaiian Islands. While these Eastern people 
do not express their joy as we do, yet it was easy 
to see how glad they were to have the husband 
and father v/ith them again after a long absence. 

5 



66 SIOK LKUITS ON rUE ORIEN r. 

The homes which such Christian famihes repre- 
sent are the hope of Japan aiui of any land. It 
was a dehght to us aU to meet this man's wife 
and his pretty children after we had become ac- 
quainted with the story of his life. 

I fear that our party became thoroughly de- 
moralized by getting ashore and seeing so many 
strange things. \\'e had not been long at the 
station before one of our passengers discovered 
that he had lost his trunk. Then he and I had 
a race in jinrikishas back to the wharf to find 
it, calling out "Hyaku ! Hyaku !" as we went 
along, which would be in English: ''Hurry up! 
Hurry up!" We found the trunk and returned 
to the station just in time for the train, when 
I discovered that I had lost my grip. Then there 
was another scene of confusion. At last it Avas 
found in the baggage car, where it had been 
checked by mistake. When we got to Tokyo, 
eighteen miles away, 1 claimed my grip, check 
or no check : but the baggage master politely re- 
fused to let me have it. In despair at last we 
went on to our hotel and to my surprise and 
gratiiication in half an hour here came the grip, 
which had fortunately been checked by a passen- 
ger who came from the Mongolia and who read- 
ily surrendered my property. A good laugh all 
around and some bread and butter for supper. 



YOKOHAMA. 67 

with a cup of tea, prepared us for cur first night 
on shore. 

Early after breakfast we are out on the 
streets of Tokyo. The first thing we meet is a 
countryman puUing a two-wheeled cart on which 
is a heavy load. By his side is a shepherd dog 
w^th a collar around his neck and a rope tied to 
it, while the other end of the rope is fastened 
to the cart, and here he is pulling for all he is 
worth by the side of his master. No whip is 
needed and no harsh word is heard — only a bit 
of encouragement now and then. 

We pass a vegetable shop in front of which is 
a large bucket the size of a half barrel, full of 
water and sweet potatoes. A boy with two sticks 
higher than his head, and tied together with a 
straw rope near the lower end of the sticks, is 
washing the sweet potatoes by stirring them with 
the sticks, which form something like a pair of 
tongs, except that the lower ends cross each oth- 
er. The method seemed to be quite effective, for 
they went in very dirty and came out very clean. 

Just beyond this was a lineman climbing up a 
slick telegraph pole which reached up higher than 
the houses. He had nothing on his feet but a 
pair of blue cotton socks; they call them "tabi." 
Between his teeth was one end of a rope. I 
looked for a spike here and there, but there was 



68 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

nothing but the sHck pole, up which that fellow 
went like a cat. He did it by bracing- the soles 
of his feet against the sides of the pole, reaching 
high up with his hands, pulling his feet up, brac- 
ing again, and repeating the operation until he 
reached the top. All the Japanese appear to me 
to be bow-legged. It is probably because they sit 
on the floor with their feet crossed under them, 
and I am sure that only a bow-legged fellow 
could climb a pole in that style, especially one as 
slick as that pole was. 

Here is a woman drying and ironing clothes 
on a board. The clothes have only been basted 
together. She takes out the basting threads, 
washes the cloth, leans the board against the 
house in the. sun, stretches the cloth out on the 
board, smoothing out the wrinkles with her hands, 
and in this way dries and irons at the same time. 
In the adjoining house we can hear the splash, 
splash, splash of the bathers, who are having a 
good time in the hot water, which the Japanese 
so much enjoy. Everybody has a hot bath every 
night if he can afford the time and money. In 
many ways the Japanese are an example to the 
world in the cleanliness of their person and of 
their houses, though there is still room for im- 
provement in some ways. 



IX. 

BENKEI THE GIANT. 

Almost as far back as the days of King Ar- 
thur in England there lived in Japan two broth- 
ers, Yoritomo and Yoshitsune.- For a while these 
brothers, who were both brave men, fought side 
by side; but at last Yoritomo became jealous of 
his younger brother and sought to kill him. Yo- 
shitsune bore with his elder brother long and 
patiently. He wrote him a letter, which the Jap- 
anese frequently refer to, in which he reminded 
him of the toils and hardships which he had un- 
dergone in his behalf, and with tender feeling 
pleaded with Yoritomo to cease from distrusting 
him. The message was a model of brotherly af- 
fection and frankness ; but it was of no avail, and 
he had to fly for his life. 

Every boy in Japan knows something of Yo- 
shitsune's history. He was so noble in charac- 
ter that he was called 'The Knight without Fear 
and without Reproach." His courage and his lof- 
tiness of purpose were such that his name and 
deeds became famous throughout the land. He 
was held un as an example to the sons of the 

(69) 



70 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

Samurai, or soldiers of Japan, and to this day 
his picture can be seen on the kites the Japanese 
are so skillful in making. 

One day as Yoshitsune was crossing a bridge 
in the city of Kioto he met a man of gigantic 
stature who was in the habit of robbing and kill- 
ing those who passed by. He was the terror of 
the neighborhood, and not a man was to be found 
who dared to arrest him. The giant's name was 
Benkei. As soon as the two met they grappled 
with each other, wrestling and fighting until the 
very bridge shook under their feet. Yoshitsune, 
though not so strong, was more skillful, and, 
throwing the giant down, pinned him to the floor 
of the bridge. The dreaded highway robber sur- 
rendered to his master, and became Yoshitsune's 
devoted servant, serving him well in many a per- 
ilous expedition. 

The two, master and servant, were obliged in 
their flight from Yoritomo to cross the Hakone 
Pass not far from Mount Fuji. They disguised 
themselves as wandering Buddhist priests who 
were collecting money for the casting of a great 
bell. Halted in the Pass by a soldier who was 
on picket duty, it looked for a moment as though 
they would be discovered and captured. Benkei, 
who was very shrewd, guessing the soldier could 
not read, drew from his girdle a roll of blank 



BENKEI THE GIANT. n\ 

paper. Looking very solemn, he pressed it to his 
forehead, making a profound bow at the same 
time, as though in prayer, and then with the 
choicest and most pious language he made up the 
contents of a letter which he led the soldier to 
suppose was written by the high priest of a tem- 
ple in Kioto, authorizing them to make a pil- 
grimage for the collection of money for the bell. 
The soldier no sooner heard the name of the 
priest, who was a very famous man, than he fell 
upon his knees, and with his face to the earth 
listened with awe to the contents of the letter. 
When Benkei thought he had said enough, he 
slyly concluded to put an end to all suspicion 
by begging the sentinel *'to excuse the improper 
behavior of his servant," who had meantime re- 
mained standing, observing that he was still a 
greenhorn and had no manners, for he had only 
recently come out of the rice field. He then 
turned to Yoshitsune, whacked him over the head, 
told him to fall at once upon his marrowbones 
and not stand there like a gawk in the presence 
of a brave soldier. The trick worked like a 
charm, and the sentinel let them go on their way 
unmolested. 

Many stories are told about Benkei's strength 
and shrewdness. He had numberless hairbreadth 
escapes while serving his master. So hot were 



y2 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

their enemies in pnrsuit that for many months he 
continnecl in the disguise of a priest and Hved in 
the neighborhood of Lake Biwa, where stands the 
temple of Miidera. In one of the buildings on 
the right side of the temple court as we ap- 
proached it from the lake is what is known as 
*'Cenkei's Soup Kettle." It is made of iron and 
so heav}' that six men could hardly lift it. It is 
four feet deep, five feet across, and fifteen feet 
nine inches in circumference. Enough soup could 
be made in this kettle at one time for a hundred 
priests. But the simple-minded country folk 
who come to see it steadfastly believe that Yo- 
shitsune's gigantic servant could swallow the en- 
tire contents at one meal. 

Not far from the temple of which we speak is 
the "Well of Akai." The source of supply for 
this well is said to be the holy water which comes 
from a pond in India. It has many virtues, one 
of which is to make the disposition harmless, and 
another is to make the temper sweet. Three em- 
perors were bathed with this holy water when 
they were born, and so the name ''Miidera," or 
"Sublime Temple," was given to the shrine. The 
word "Mikado," which is applied to the Emperor 
of Japan, means "Sublime Porte or Gate." The 
priests who worship at this shrine insist that if 
anv man drinks the water of this well he will es- 




BELL OF MIIDERA. 



BENKEI THE GIANT. 73 

cape all the evils of life and his sins will be de- 
stroyed. 

Climbhig farther up the hill, we come to the 
great Bell of Miidera. It is in a little pavilion by 
itself, and we had to pay a small admission fee 
to get to see it. Scarcely had we entered before 
a Japanese, who sat on his heels behind a little 
bookstall on our right, began in a singsong tone 
to sound the praises of Benkei and the bell. He 
had his story so pat that he reeled it of¥ by the 
yard, w^ould stop short off in the middle or at 
any point, and exclaim: *'Here is a plan of the 
temple; buy a copy for half a cent. Have you 
got a photograph of the bell? It is the most 
famous in all Japan. You must not go away 
without hearing the story of Benkei." While 
saying these words his nimble fingers were at 
work picking up a history of the temple here or 
a picture of the bell there, and selling the same 
to the visitors while he returned to the thread 
of his story with scarcely a break in his voice or 
change in his expression. 

"Listen to the story of the bell," said he as a 
lot of farmers and their wives gathered around 
and stared with all their might. "You have all 
heard of the renowned Benkei, the servant of 
Yoshitsune. He became a priest and lived on the 
mountain side far up above Lake Biwa. Al- 



74 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

though he had drunk water from the well of 
Akai and made soup with it in the great iron 
bowl, his temper had not yet become fully sweet- 
ened. The truth is he was still the old Benkei in 
disguise, and he resisted its virtues. Falling out 
with the priests of this temple because, perhaps, 
he thought of them as disloyal to his master, he 
came down the mountain one night, placed the 
bell on his shoulder, and returning to his fast- 
ness, almost as high as the clouds, he swung it 
in mid-air where it could sound out its best notes. 
Mark what strength this giant had ! The bell is 
five feet three inches high, higher than that farm- 
er who stands by its side. It would take three of 
you to reach around it and twenty men could not 
move it from its place. But the giant bore it off 
with ease and struck it with a great wooden beam 
to make it talk. Alas ! the only thing it would 
say was : 'Miidera, Miidera, take me back to Mii- 
dera!' This was all in so mournful a voice that 
Benkei got mad, tore it from its fastening, and 
kicked it down the mountain. It did not stop 
rolling until it reached its old resting place, but 
it was cracked and scarred by its journey. If you 
don't believe my story, examine the cracks and 
feel the scratches on the left side there." 

The clever story-teller, with a final wave of 
his hand, as if to crown his efforts by a master 



BEXKEI THE GIANT. 75 

Stroke, cried out: "Get back there, you woman, 
wife of that country gawk ! Don't look too hard 
at that bell ! Years ago a lady of rank gazed so 
admiringly upon it that she pulled a piece out as 
big as your two hands ; and if you go on looking 
like that with those gimlet eyes of yours, you 
might pull the whole side of it out, and then what 
would Miidera do for its famous bell?" 



X. 



UNDER THE MOUNTAINS TO LAKE 
BIWA. 

It was on a beautiful May morning that we 
started for a trip through the Lake Biw^a Canal. 
This canal leads from the Basin on the west (or 
Kioto) side of the mountains through a tunnel 
to Lake Biwa on the other side. 

On our way to the Basin we walked by the 
side of the incline, which runs from the canal 
below to the Basin 1,900 feet above, and which is 
so steep that a cable is necessary to haul the 
boats up to it from the city below\ These boats 
are mostly for freight, and are about forty feet 
long. The cradle is like a great wagon on small 
wheels. One runs down the incline, held by one 
^ cable, while the other runs up the incline drawn 
by another cable. The cradle that goes down aft- 
er the boats runs right into the water at the foot 
of the mountain and slips under the boat, which 
may be loaded with bales of cloth or goods to 
be sold to the people who live around the shores 

(76) 



UNDER THE MOUNTAINS TO LAKE BIWA. 77 

of Lake Biwa. The boatmen, with bamboo poles, 
guide their boat into the cradle, signal that they 
are ready, and then the cable begins to pull the 
boat and all right up out of the water on its 
overland trip until it reaches the basin above, 
which is the mouth of the canal through the 
mountains. 

A passenger boat awaited us at the top of the 
incline, and in we got with the other passengers, 
who were all Japanese, having to sit on the 
floor on straw mats as they did; and then we 
started for the tunnel through the mountain just 
ahead of us. It was a peculiar experience to 
have to go into that dark hole about ten feet 
high, twenty feet wide, and with at least five 
feet of water under us running as swiftly as a 
mill race. If we had been spilled out, it would 
have been almost impossible to do anything but 
cling to the side of the boat, if we could have 
gotten hold of that. The small stationary wire 
cable, which ran along the right side of the tun- 
nel, was too high up from the water to be 
reached. There crouched just behind me a 
pretty little Japanese girl, about ten years old, 
who with her little brother and her mother, who 
was a farmer's wife, were going through to their 
home on the lake. It was their first trip, as they 
had come over the mountain, and I could feel her 



78 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

pressing against my back almost in a tremble for 
fear we might upset. 

Just before our boat started in the boatman 
lighted a paper lantern and placed it midway 
between the bow and stern. This, with a flick- 
ering torch, was the only relief from the black 
darkness which enveloped us. The lantern soon 
went out, and there we were with only an oc- 
casional flare of light sometimes thrown upon 
the low roof above and sometimes upon the swift 
current by our side. Our boatman, who stood 
in the bow, was a powerful fellow. Bare to the 
waist, his muscles stood out, in the occasional 
flash of the torch, in great knots as he threw 
himself first on one foot and then on the other, 
grasping the cable at the side of the tunnel with 
his two hands and pulling the boat forward with 
a vigorous swing. By the time we were through 
the first tunnel, which took us forty-five min- 
utes, he was dripping with sweat. 

The daylight was sweet as we swept out from 
under the mountain into the canal on the other 
side and were towed by the two boatmen through 
fields of rice and barley on the east of us and 
along the mountain slope on the wxst, where 
graceful bamboo groves waved at us and where 
the pink azalea bloomed in profusion in and 
about the pines and chestnut trees. We soon 



UNDER THE MOUNTAINS TO LAKE BIWA. 79 

came to a second tunnel, shorter than the first, 
which also ran through a high mountain, and 
then reappearing we wound along through a 
lovely valley until we came to the third and long- 
est tunnel, into which we plunged in company 
with several other boats. It seemed as though 
we would never get through that Egyptian dark- 
ness, but in a little less than an hour we were in 
the sunshine once more and on the bank and 
walking toward the lock, where the water of 
Lake Biwa is let in through great gates and let 
out again, so that boats can be raised and low- 
ered because of the difference between the level 
of the lake and of the water in the canal. The 
whole trip took us two hours and fifteen min- 
utes. 

This wonderful piece of engineering was due 
to the genius of Mr. Tanabe Sakuro, a gradu- 
ate of the Imperial College in Tokyo. His pur- 
pose was to conduct the water of Lake Biwa 
through the canal under the mountains into the 
city of Kioto on the west side of the range, so 
that rice, barley, bricks, lime, and many other 
things can be brought directly into the great city 
in the shortest time and at the lowest price. Be- 
sides this freight, many passengers, like our- 
selves, make the trip at a cost of four cents each 
way. In addition the rice fields are irrigated 



80 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

along the line of the canal, mill wheels are turned 
where wheat and barley flour is being made, and 
electric lights are furnished to Kioto as well as 
electric power for street cars. 

One or two of the inscriptions over the en- 
trances of these tunnels will be of interest. Mar- 
quis Ito is the author of one inscription engraved 
in the granite which arches over the canal, and 
reads: 'The thousand and ten thousand changes 
of scenery." At the other end of the tunnel we 
found the words, "Hoso Banzai;" or in English: 
**May the Emperor's dynasty continue for- 
ever!" Still a third by Count Inouye is from 
the classics of Confucius: "The benevolent m.an 
seeks the mountains (for meditation), while the 
wise man seeks the water." 

As our hostess, Mrs. W. A. Davis, had pro- 
vided us with a substantial lunch, filling a neat 
little bamboo basket, we determined to make a 
trip down the lake shore to the famous pine tree 
at Karasaki. Jumping into a jinrikisha, which 
held two, a merry ride of over half an hour 
brought us to a little peninsula jutting out into 
the lake, on which stands the most wonderful 
tree we ever saw. It is supposed to have been 
planted during the reign of the Emperor Jomei 
(629-641), which would make it over one thou- 
sand years old. It is certainly the oldest pine 



UNDER THE MOUNTAINS TO LAKE BIWA. 8l 

tree in Japan and perhaps in the world. Its 
height is only 42 feet, but it would take five per- 
sons with outstretched hands to reach round the 
trunk, and the branches from east to west meas- 
ure 162 feet, while those from north to south 
extend over 200 feet. It covers about two- 
thirds of an acre, which is now carefully fenced 
in because the body of the tree has to be pro- 
tected by filling the hollow places with plaster. 
The limbs, hundreds of years ago, were trained 
to turn down, and here and there where they 
have been bent over decay has set in, and one 
finds a little board roof built over the spot by the 
Japanese to shelter it carefully from the weath- 
er. As the branches extend out so far from the 
trunk, they have to be propped up with 380 
wooden supports. 

It is said that the Emperor referred to above 
had a follower who, while living here in Kara- 
saki, planted a bush in the courtyard of his 
residence, and called it ''Nokiha-no-Matsu," 
which means : "The pine tree growing by the 
eaves of the house." This shows how sma:ll it 
was when first set out. There are many Japa- 
nese poems written in praise and admiration of 
this marvelous tree, which is one of the wonders 
of Japan. No wonder the poets were stirred to 
write, for as we sat looking out of the window^ 



82 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

of the tea house near by and caught sight of the 
waters of Lake Biwa through the branches and 
heard the ripple of the waves we wished for the 
skill and genius to write a poem on the old pine 
tree of Karasaki. 



XI. 

ARIMA, THE CRATER CITY. 

An early start from Kobe by train and then 
by jinrikisha enables you to reach Arhna for 
dinner. It is a beautiful trip. On the right of 
the train, as we sweep along, is the magnificent 
bay on which I counted 250 sailboats at one 
time. On our left, upon the crest of the moun- 
tain range — perched midway, as it were, between 
the sea and the sky — is the temple dedicated to 
the mother of Buddha. Our train dashes along 
the seashore and through the foothills of the 
mountain range, tunneling under the rivers in- 
stead of passing over them. In a half hour we 
are sweeping through rice fields, beyond which 
rises old Bismarck. This has become well known 
among the Japanese and foreigners from its re- 
semblance to the bald head of the old German 
statesman, who had only a few stray hairs stand- 
ing up from the top of his pate. The two or 
three lonely trees on top of the hill, which can 
easily be seen from a great distance, makes the 
resemblance striking enough for the nickname 
which has long been used in and about Kobe. 

(83) 



84 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

Some of our party took "rickshaws" from the 
wayside station, where we left the train, while 
three of us concluded to walk. A few minutes 
brought us to the opening of a mountain gorge, 
down which the vv^ater poured in tiny rivulets, 
gathered in waterfalls, leaped from crag to 
crag, dashed over bowlders, and finally gathered 
in a stream which swept swiftly by our very 
feet. The road ran zigzag, in and out, around 
the side of this ravine, looking at times as though 
it would be swept by the torrent from under our 
feet, and at others, as we looked up, seemed to 
be suspended in mid-air. The Japanese are 
rightly famous for their country roads so beau- 
tifully made, so well kept up, and making it pos- 
sible for the people who live in one valley to 
cross over the mountain ranges, with vegetables 
and fruits on their backs, to the villages and mar- 
ket towns in another valley on the far side of 
the range. 

One intensely interesting thing we sa>v as we 
made our way up to Arima was what might be 
called the "shingling of the mountains." The 
rains are so heavy and the earth so loose that 
the mountain sides are continually washing away. 
Pebbles, rocks, and even great bowlders are 
loosened from their places, rolled down the gorge 
into the bed of the stream, and are swept out 



ARIMA, THE CRATER CITY. 85 

into the valley below, destroying the rice and 
beans and injuring the little farms on every side. 
To stop this, men are employed by the govern- 
ment to climb up the steep hillside with clumps 
of sod in their hands. These are actually fas- 
tened into the ground by sharp bamboo stakes 
driven through them, just as a carpenter fas- 
tens shingles on the roof of a house with nails. 
Line after line of sod is fastened upon these bare 
places, sometimes tied with straw ropes, until the 
grass can get a foothold, and thus the nakedness 
of the mountain is covered with a garment of 
green and the farmers miles below have their 
little farms and garden plots preserved from the 
dangerous wash and flood which once in a while 
carries their thatched cottages into the sea. 

We reach Arima at last. It has been a hard 
climb, but a delightful one. The little town is 
nestled away among the mountains, and a por- 
tion of it is said by some of the Japanese to be 
in the crater of an old volcano. Up from the 
tiny Japanese house where we stayed the cliffs 
rose like sentinels about us; so steep were the 
walls that it looked as though only an ant might 
climb up, and yet one morning flags were fly- 
ing from the very edge, planted there by some 
active Japanese boys who had scaled the heights 
from a rugged path on the opposite side. 



86 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

Whether this be a crater or not, there are so 
many things told us about it and the history of 
the town that we feel as though we were over a 
volcano. Four or five years ago the people who 
lived here were greatly alarmed by the jarring 
of the earth beneath their feet and by the ter- 
rific explosions which fell upon their ears. At 
first they thought it was the blasting of blocks 
of granite in some quarry down in the valley; 
then they supposed it to be gun practice across 
the mountains on the bay near Kobe, where the 
Japanese battle ships cast anchor. But these ter- 
rible noises continued by day and by night. The 
glass rattled in the windows, the tumblers jingled 
on the tables in the hotel, and then would come 
a sudden bumping of the earth under their feet 
like that of a farm wagon jostling over a rough 
country road. At last the scientists and students 
of earthquakes came from Tokyo and elsewhere, 
and after a careful examination declared that 
there was a great cavern in the earth under one of 
the mountains near Arima, and that the jarring 
and sound of explosions were caused by the roof 
of an immense hollow place in the earth caving 
in. This so alarmed the people of Arima that 
many of them left their homes. After a few 
months, however, the noises ceased, and here the 
Japanese are back again, bathing as usual in the 




TORIJIGOKU, ARIMA. 



ARIMA, THE CRATER CITY. 8/ 

hot Springs, making their beautiful basketware, 
having little family picnics on the mountain side, 
and enjoying the quiet and rest of the summer 
season, apparently without fear of what might 
happen at any moment. 

An interesting walk about Arima is to the 
waterfall, where, like a bridal veil, down through 
the pine trees and then over the rocks, there 
tumbles a stream of water which is one of the 
attractions of the place. Just beyond that, along 
a narrow path, where we walked through groves 
of waving bamboo, is the Torijigoku^ or Bird 
Hell. In the ground at our very feet there 
is a square hole. It seems to have rocky sides 
and must be very deep. It is half full of water, 
dark brow^n in color, and on the surface of 
which bubbles are constantly rising. We are 
told by the Japanese that no bird can fly across 
this place with safety. If one chances to be too 
venturesome and comes within a few feet of the 
Torijigoku, he is overcome by some magic spell 
and falls helplessly into the jaws of this earth 
monster. If this were in China, they would be 
sure to say that it was a dragon under the 
ground with his mouth wide open waiting to 
destroy its victim. 

Looking down into this gruesome place, we 
actually find a dead bird. It seems to have 



88 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

fallen during its flight across the place, for there 
is no tree above our heads, or perhaps it unsus- 
pectingly lighted on the edge and was overcome. 
The explanation is in the poisonous gas which 
comes up through the water. The poor little 
bird breathes some of this into his lungs, and 
before he knows it is overcome and drops dead. 
So famous is this spot that the Japanese have 
cut the name Torijigoku in the stone near by 
which marks the place, and have erected a shrine 
just a few feet beyond, where an image of Bud- 
dha has been engraved on a block of granite and 
stands guard, as it were, between the parting of 
the ways, for two paths meet at this point. 

We are glad to have other memories connect- 
ed with Arima in the mountains. The Presby- 
terian missionaries have held delightful meetings 
here and the Methodists have just closed their 
Annual Conference, over which Bishop A. W. 
Wilson presided. As we sat in the Uttle chapel 
by the side of the road on Sunday morning and 
heard the missionary children sing "There Is 
Sunshine in My Soul," it did seem one of the 
loveliest spots on earth. There was no quaking 
of mountains nor rumbling under the ground. 
The rain that had been pouring down in tor- 
rents had ceased, and down through the tender 
leaves of the Japanese maple the sunshine glint- 



ARIMA^ THE CRATER CITY. 89 

ed and traveled until every shadow seemed to 
be chased away, and there was joy and gladness 
in every face and in every heart. May we not 
sincerely hope that this may be a prophecy to 
us of the future of Japan, when the light of God's 
truth is to be found evervwhere? 



XII. 
OUTDOOR LIFE IN KOREA. 

There is a legend in Korea that three sages, 
three thousand years ago, came out of a fissure 
in the ground. This was on the island of Quel- 
part, to which Prince Pak Yong Ho was recently 
exiled. Each of the wise men found a large box 
floating in from the south containing a pony, a 
calf, a pig, a dog, and a wife. The pony in the 
story is put first and the poor wife comes last. 
But this is the place that woman too often occu- 
pies in heathen countries. Girls frequently have 
no names at all, and are numbered one, two, 
three. Even grown women are spoken of as 
"the daughter of so and so" or *'the sister of so 
and so." 

But to return to the pony. He is the livest 
thing in Korea. When I made my trip from 
Wonsan to Seoul with Dr. Hardie over the 
mountains, I was given one of these ponies to 
ride. He was so small my feet almost touched 
the ground, but we waded or swam through the 
deepest rivers and climbed the steepest mountain 

(90) 



OUTDOOR LIFE IN KOREA. 9I 

roads. His nostrils were slit to give him wind, 
and he was so particular that he would only drink 
hot water and eat cooked food. The river water 
is so cold, coming as it does from the mountains, 
that the natives train the ponies not to drink the 
water for fear of colic. 

When we reached the inn, or caravansary, at 
night, we passed in through a great front gate 
and came to a court, on one side of which was a 
row of sheds with tile or straw roof, hard earth- 
en floor well tramped down, and troughs hewn 
out of solid logs, where the ponies were fed. The 
impatient little animals would scream and kick 
for a whole half hour while their beans and 
chopped straw were being boiled in another part 
of the court. The noise was so great at one 
time early in the night and the yells of the mapu 
(horse boys) were so fierce that I ran out into 
the court to see what the trouble was. The con- 
fusion was great enough for it to have been a 
tiger carrying one of these little Shetland ponies 
off in his mouth. It turned out to be a fight over 
some beans between my pony and his neighbor. 
Mine had behaved himself so badly that two of 
the mapic had put a rope under his forelegs, 
thrown it over a beam, and had actually pulled 
him up off the ground. He was so chagrined 
at this sort of punishment in the presence of all 



92 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

the other ponies that he behaved himself for the 
rest of the night; but he lost his supper. 

One of the ponies in our party lay down twice 
in the middle of a river, leaving his rider to 
flounder out the best way he could. While a pony 
will kick a stranger and try to bite his feet off, 
as mine did several times, he will let the mapii 
catch him by the nose or hold on to his tail as 
he goes up over the rocky hills. It is astonish- 
ing what these little fellows can carry. One of 
ours had on top of his wooden pack saddle two 
boxes, one on each side filled with food and 
cooking utensils, on top of these a folding cot, 
on top of the cot a cotton mattress and a bundle 
of bedding, with an American leather valise to 
balance the bundle, and a frying pan on top of 
all. It was a curious sight, but that frying pan 
turned out to be one of the most valuable arti- 
cles we had. It and the coffee pot were on the 
fire morning and night. With a cup of hot cof- 
fee in the early morning while the stars were still 
shining, a piece of fried ham, and a slice of toast 
browned over the fire on the end of a stick, wq 
made a good breakfast and were ready for a big 
day's travel. 

The Koreans are as fond of dried fish as we 
are of smoked ham. The sea on the east coast 
and far to the south furnishes a fish called the 



OUTDOOR LIFE IN KOREA." 93 

ling, which is caught by thousands, dried, packed 
in bundles, and carried on the jiggy or on pony 
back into the remote mountain regions. Shark 
meat is much eaten and so is the octopus, with 
its ugly body and its dangling legs, which make 
the latter one of the most hideous monsters of 
the deep. It has a pouch out of which is thrown 
an inky sort of fluid which discolors the water 
so that its victims fail to see it approach. Then 
with those slimy legs it coils itself all around its 
prey until the poor frightened victim cannot get 
away. In some portions of the Japan Sea the 
octopus has been found large enough to drag a 
fisherman to the bottom. 

In ancient times among the islands south of 
Korea there was much fishing done by the Ko- 
reans ; but it has fallen largely into the hands 
of the Japanese, who now include the fishing for 
pearls. It is along the rivers, even in the winter 
time when they are frozen up hard and fast, that 
we can see the native fisherman seeking his 
daily meal. Far out on the ice, with a log under 
him or a rude sled, with a straw mat folded up 
for warmth and protection, the fisherman seats 
himself at the hole he has cut in the ice. He 
has so many cotton-padded jackets on, and his 
big trousers and wooden shoes are so bunglesome, 
that it is a wonder he can exert himself enough 



94 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

to do anything. Even his head is wrapped up 
until YOU can see only his face and his black 
topknot sticking up through his cap. Here he 
sits by the hour awaiting his opportunity to har- 
poon the unwary fish that come to the surface, or 
to catch them in the meshes of his little scoop 
net. 

It takes very little to make some people satis- 
fied. About the only enjoyment this fisherman 
has is his pipe, with a bowl the size of a thimble. 
The pipestem is made of bamboo, and often is 
so long that the bowl can rest on the ground 
while the smoker puffs at the other end. On our 
way to Seoul we saw one man at the railway 
station who had a pipe so long that he could not 
reach the bowl with a match while he had the 
stem in his mouth. We all wondered what he 
was going to do. He solved the problem easily 
by lighting a match, sticking the end of it in the 
ground, and then standing off with one end of 
the pipe in his mouth he applied the other to the 
fire and puffed away with all his might. 

These simple-hearted people are fond of work- 
ing together. This is true of them when trans- 
planting the rice in the spring or cutting the 
wheat in the autumn. When eight or ten labor- 
ers get together, as they often do, in spading dirt 
with a long-handled spade held by one man, while 



OUTDOOR LIFE IN KOREA. 95 

four or five more on each side grasp a straw 
rope fastened near the blade, they wait until the 
leader chants a song of four syllables, repeat it 
after him, give a jerk and a swing, and throw 
the dirt far off into the field. Here is one of 
their labor songs : 

Take a hold there, take a hold there; 

Don't be lazy, don't be lazy; 

Whoop her up, whoop her up. 

Ho, there! Ho, there! 

Knock 'em silly, knock 'em silly ; 

Now the chorus, now the chorus. 

Hey — ah, Hey — ah. 

The leader repeats the first words, the men 
repeat them again, and then they all join in the 
chorus. In this way much of the hard work 
they have to do is made easy, and what otherwise 
would be a burden too hard to be borne is turned 
into a sort of amusement for the crowd. 



XIII. 

THE STREETS OF SEOUL. 

The main streets of the city of Seoul, the 
capital of Korea, are very broad; but like those 
of Peking, China, they are often so filled up with 
little booths on each side that it is difficult on 
a market day to get along in some places. We 
meet a man with a jiggy on his back. This is 
a carrying frame made of wood and preferably 
of the two branches of a tree, with the smaller 
branch sticking out at an angle from the larger 
so as to form a big notch or rack into which al- 
most anything can be placed, from pine brush 
piled higher than a man's head to a pig with its 
feet tied hard and fast and sometimes a straw 
rope tied around its mouth. It is said that some 
of these jiggy men can carry two barrels of flour 
on their backs. The coolie sets his jiggy on the 
ground and props it up with a forked stick. 
When he takes up his load he kneels down and 
puts his arms through two loops made of rope 
that are fitted to his shoulders. By leaning for- 
ward he gets the weight on his back and hips, 
rises first from one knee and then from the other 

(96) 



THE STREETS OF SEOUL. 97 

by the aid of his forked stick, and off goes the 
jiggy-koon (for that is what they call him) for 
a trip of one hundred miles perhaps, makmg the 
journey in three days. 

" Here is a booth in which an old man with a 
high-top hat, long linen robe, and a pipe which 
reaches to the ground is selling medicme. On 
the table before him are roots and herbs of every 
kind. When you come to look carefully you also 
find tiger's bones to make you brave if you are 
timid, antelope powder to make you spry if you 
have the rheumatism, and powdered centipeds 
to be taken with hot water if you have the stom- 
ach ache. These are the old-style Korean reme- 
dies with which people are doctored. Yonder at 
the head of the street, out through the city gate. 
is Dr Avison's Mission Hospital, where poor 
sick Koreans can have the best medical and 
surgical treatment, without centipeds or tigers 
bones. It is a pleasure to turn from the one and 
enter the other, where the trained nurses pass 
quietly around the beds in the sick wards and 
where the Christian doctor is so able and will- 
ing to do his utmost to stop the pain and save 
the life of the suffering Korean patient. 

We meet two women who are curiously 
enough dressed. One has a white veil, or gown, 
drawn so closely around her face that you can 
7 



98 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

see only her nose and one eye; while the other 
wears a quaint garment with what looks like 
green sleeves hanging down on each side of her 
head, and the body of the gown is folded up on 
top of her head in a little square pad. This is 
the costume that many women wear when they 
walk on the streets of the capital. 

One story I heard in accounting for it was that 
in ancient times Korea was constantly threat- 
ened by her enemies. The Chinese soldiers would 
overrun one side of the country and the Japa- 
nese the other. Then again the Koreans warred 
among themselves. They wore armor when they 
went to the battle, and fought with bows, arrows, 
and spears. As they could not wear this armor 
all the time and guard their flocks or cultivate 
the fields, the women would put on the armor 
and ca'rry the weapons of warfare ready to hand 
to their husbands or sons in case of need. When 
the time passed for guarding themselves in this 
way the custom had become so old and habitual 
that the women began to wear green or purple 
gowns on their heads in imitation of a suit of 
armor. It is a queer story and hard to believe. 

Looking down a side street, the eye falls upon 
a great stone tortoise with an immense tablet of 
solid rock rising from the middle of his back. It 
is one of the curiosities of Seoul, because of its 



THE STREETS OF SEOUL. QQ 

size and of the beautiful work in stone. The 
tortoise is symbolical of long life, and these mon- 
uments are often erected in China and in Korea 
to commemorate some great deed or in memory 
of some distinguished man. 

This reminds me of a story which Mr. Hul- 
bert tells and which makes us think of "Uncle 
Remus :" "A wicked tortoise, in search of a. rab- 
bit's liver to use as medicine in healing the sea 
king's daughter, persuaded a rabbit into riding 
on its back across the water to an island that the 
tortoise said was a rabbit's paradise. When well 
out from shore the tortoise warned the rabbit 
to prepare to die, for his liver was needed by the 
sick daughter far down under the water. After 
a moment's thought the rabbit laughed and said : 
'You might have had it without all this trouble. 
We are made with removable livers, so that after 
eating too much we can throw our livers out and 
wash them and keep them cool. I had just laid 
mine out to dry when you came, and your story 
was so fascinating that I forgot the liver entirely. 
You are welcome to it if you will let me show 
you where it is.' The tortoise turned round and 
swam to the shore to get the rabbit's liver. The 
latter jumped off and scampered away, having a 
good laugh at the expense of his enemy." 

On our left along the street, not far from our 



lOO SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

mission houses, is a paper store. The Koreans 
are noted for their splendid oil paper. Great 
sheets of it are made for the floor and of such a 
size as to fill the whole room. These are easily 
washed and kept clean. Fans are made of the 
same material and pasted on fine strips of bam- 
boo. The fan is so strong and the paper so well 
oiled that it can be dipped in water without hurt- 
ing it and be used as a sprinkler for the floor or 
the yard in front or at the back of the store. The 
Koreans taught the Japanese the art of making 
paper. 

A side street crosses a ditch at the bottom of 
which is a little stream of running water. This 
must be washing day. A row of women on this 
side and several on the other are rubbing and 
scrubbing their clothes on the rough stones which 
are placed at intervals on each side of the water. 
Woe be to you if you have come from America 
with a small stock of linen collars and cuflfs or 
any other sort of clothes that need to be washed 
often ! If the stone is not rough enough, a stick 
is brought into play, and the clothes are ham- 
mered with a good will until the washerwoman 
is satisfied that she has done her best to break ev- 
ery button, rip up the seams, and wear an occa- 
sional hole here and there. 

Another dutv of the women is full of interest 




WASHING. 




IRONING. 



THE STRRF.TS OF SEOUL. TOt 

to the tourist : that of poundini>- their clothes, or 
rather their husliand's elothes. 1^he first nii;ht 
[ spent in Seoul, lonj;- after the midnight hour 
in an alle\- near by 1 heard a i)onndini;- whieh 
was done with sueh regularity that it seemed to 
be a part of a maehine. The next morning I 
was told diat it was probably some man's wife 
who was beating his linen gown with paddles, 
which are slightly curved and which by these 
regular strokes not only smooth the wrinkles 
out of the linen gown and thus iron it, but make 
it glisten and shine until it looks as though it 
were absolutely new. Sometimes instead of 
one woman two will do the ironing, so that four 
sticks are applied to the cloth, which is laid on 
a piece of wood in folds. All night long they 
may continue the work of preparing the master 
of the house for his journey or official visit, when 
he must be clothed with all the dignity that his 
stiffened and whitened gown can give him. Tru- 
ly half of the people in this world do not know 
how the other half live. 



XIV. 
THE TIGER HUNTER. 

Kim In Won^ the tiger hunter, has just been 
in to see me. He is the first baptized member 
of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in 
Korea, and hves in the Httle village of Ko Yang. 
Although the old man is seventy-six years of age, 
he is quite erect, still vigorous, and has walked 
over fifteen miles this morning to pay his respects 
to the visitor who has come from America. 

A number of years ago Dr. Scranton, of Seoul, 
had some colporteurs under his direction, two of 
whom went to the village of Ko Yang to sell 
Bibles. Hearing of Mr. Kim, who had a repu- 
tation in all that section as a hunter and a man 
of great courage, they called at his home. The 
following is his story of the visit and what oc- 
curred afterwards as he told it to me, Rev. W. G. 
Cram acting as my interpreter : 

"They came to my village and to my home," 
said Mr. Kim. "When I found them at my door, 
I said : 'Come in.' Upon asking their mission 
they replied that they came to sell a wonderful 
book and to preach about the new doctrine." The 

(102) 



THE TIGER HUNTER. IO3 

old man, in his vigorous way and with a twinkle 
in his eye, looked at me and remarked: "I told 
them to begin preaching at once that I might 
hear them. They did so and preached well. 
When they had finished, I said that I would be- 
Heve from this time. They both seemed glad, 
and perhaps would have been contented to go 
to another village ; but I was not willing for them 
to do this, and said : 'Let us go right out and be- 
gin to preach to the villagers of Ko Yang.' " 

Dr. C. F. Reid baptized Mr. Kim fourteen 
years ago. His son and grandson are both Chris- 
tians. He brought me a letter which he had 
written the Doctor, and asked me to convey it to 
him with his love. He was delighted to know 
that while the good Doctor was living in Oak- 
land, Cal., and prevented from returning to Ko- 
rea, his son, Dr. Wightman Reid, was coming 
to Korea to take charge of the hospital in 
Songdo. 

I knew the old man was a famous tiger hunter 
as well as an earnest Christian. Eight years ago, 
when on a visit to Korea, one dark night he and 
another native Christian walked two miles 
through a drizzling rain to meet me on my way 
to Ko Yang. When I dismounted and urged 
him, who was so much older than I, to get on 
my pony and ride over the slippery road, he 



I04 SI OK Lu;iris on tuk ouiknt. 

laughed and said: "How could I respect myself 
to have you walk when you have come ten thou- 
sand miles from the Christian land to visit Korea 
in her darkness and need ?*' He would not ride, 
and so we walked along together to his house, 
where he had a warm supper prepared for us, 
and where we spent the hours until midnight 
with the rooms packed full of listeners as we 
went over the old story of how Jesus came to 
save the world from its sin. 

Reminding him of that visit and that we were 
old friends, I asked him to tell me something of 
his life as a hunter. He replied that from twenty 
years of age he had with knife and gun sought 
the tiger in the mountains, and in all had killed 
fourteen of them with his own hand. Korean 
tigers are among the largest and fiercest. It is 
said that during some winters, when the snow 
remains long on the ground, they have been 
known to leap upon the roof of a Korean house, 
tear up the thatch, and carry otf one of the chil- 
dren. The year before I made my last visit to 
this country a hungry tiger had come into the 
village in the neighborhood of Wonsan and car- 
ried off a yearling calf between his jaws. 

"Have you ever been in peril of your life?" I 
asked, trying to draw the old man out. 

"Yes," he said : "I had to face one tiger so 




KIM, THE TJGEK HUNTER. 



THE rlGER HUNTER. IO5 

large that it took eight men to carry him after I 
had killed the beast. For a while it seemed im- 
possible for me to overcome him. At another 
time an unusually large tiger, which I had shot, 
leaped upon me. I fell with my face to the 
ground as he sprang, and was bitten by him on 
the back; but my clothing was so loose that it 
got tangled in his teeth." 

"How in the world did you escape ?" I asked. 

He replied: *'A friend was with me on the 
hunt. I cried out to him: 'Can't you help a 
fellow? Shoot, or I will be a dead man.' He 
dared not shoot for fear of killing me, but he 
beat the tiger with the butt of his gun. The fero- 
cious beast sprang forward and fell into a ditch, 
carrying me with him. The bullets which I had 
already put into his body had taken effect, and 
he was dead. With my back badly torn and 
bleeding, I crawled out from under the tiger's 
body with the help of my friend and found my- 
self still able to walk. He stopped the blood and 
then we measured the tiger's mouth with a stick 
and found it one foot wide." 

Looking at me with his honest eyes, he said: 
''Ah, Moksa, what am I that I should have es- 
caped from a tiger with such a mouth as that? 
Surely the Lord wanted me for something." 

At another time he told me that just as he was 



I06 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

about to shoot his gun exploded. The very moun- 
tains seemed to leap into the air. His clothing- 
was torn, and he actually found a piece of the gun 
up one of his sleeves. Others looking on re- 
marked: "He is preserved by the Lord of heav- 
en." 

I said to old Mr. Kim, who was decorated by 
the Emperor for his bravery and prowess as a 
tiger hunter, and who wears the decoration, 
which is something like an earring: ''You have 
indeed been preserved by the Heavenly Father 
to be a witness among your own people. Do you 
preach to them?" I asked. 

"Yes," said the old man, 'T try to be a faithful 
witness ; but the ears of the people are wet. They 
listen like they had a wet cloth over their ears; 
they do not believe in the power of the gospel, 
and say : 'How can any man do that ?' But," he 
continued, "there is a little group of faithful ones 
who are true to God." 

It was an inspiration to talk with old Kim and 
find how simple and childlike was his faith in 
Christ. He had come with his long white linen 
robe on, which was spotlessly clean. Under the 
robe and fastened to his waist was a linen bag, 
and upon my inquiring what he carried about 
him in so large a bundle he smiled and, reaching 
down, produced a well-worn New Testament and 



THE TIGER HUNTER. I07 

a hymn book, without which he never went any- 
where. As we parted, after a prayer in EngHsh 
and then one in Korean, he said: "The joy of the 
presence of the Holy Spirit in my heart is with- 
out Hmit. I read the third chapter of Hebrews 
and pray that Christ will help me to hold fast the 
confidence and the rejoicing of the hope firm 
unto the end." Then brushing the tears from 
his eyes, he added : "Sometimes as I lie upon my 
back in my little village home it seems to me I 
can see Christ bearing the cross for me. It is 
too much, it is too much that a poor creature 
such as I should have so great a Saviour. Pray 
that I may not fall into temptation, but be kept 
faithful and be able at last to enter upon the 
Sabbath of the Lord, where I shall have rest for 
evermore." 

Surely the missionaries must have great en- 
couragement in the conversion of a man who 
was so bold and fierce in early life, but now has 
become gentle and so full of patience and faith 
that he is a living example and pattern to his own 
countrymen. 



XV. 

COUNTRY FOLKS. 

The best way to study a country is to see how 
the real folks live. The most of these are found 
out in the country living a simple life. Here we 
are in a little valley with high mountains on 
each side. The mountains in Korea are beauti- 
ful, even if they are bare. In the springtime 
they are colored with pinks, azaleas, wild daisies, 
here and there a tiger lily, and down behind the 
rocks or just on the border of the rank grass 
are modest little violets that are just as fragrant 
as those of Tennessee or Kentucky. In the au- 
tumn, when the November sun rises and sets, 
these rugged old mountains have a rosy hue and 
then a deep purple coloring that lifts you straight 
up to God and makes you think of higher things. 
I can't help but think that some of the strength 
of character which the Koreans have comes from 
their great mountains that tower so high above 
their heads. But at last it takes the Spirit of 
Him who made the everlasting hills to change 
the heart and purify the life. 
(io8) 



COUNTRY FOLKS. lOQ 

Yonder to the right on the hillside is a wheat 
field where the grain has been cut close to the 
ground with a sickle. Higher up you see buck- 
wheat growing with its reddish stem and small 
white flower not 3'et ripe. Men must be like 
goats to be able to scramble up such steep places, 
plant and cultivate the grain, and then carry it 
on their backs to the little villages that, with their 
brown straw roofs, look like clumps of mush- 
rooms down below. In our walk we have just 
reached one of these curious little dwellings, with 
its mud walls daubed on a frame of reeds and 
wood. Some parts of it seem to be blocks of 
earth cut with a spade and piled up betw^een 
wooden posts until they have dried there hard 
and fast. The floor is of earth, beaten down 
hard, while the roof, curiously enough, is the 
most expensive part of the house. It consists of 
layers of straw placed one above the other until 
the covering is nearly a foot thick, and then straw 
ropes are passed over the roof from front to rear 
and end to end to hold the straw down. Once 
or twice I have seen a piece of rock tied to the 
end of each rope and dangling at the eaves in 
order to keep the wind from blowing the roof 
off. I couldn't help but wonder what would be- 
come of the little baby boy toddling around if 
those rocks should fall. The reason the roof fre- 



no SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

quently costs more than the house is because it 
has to be renewed so often. 

We have almost stumbled upon a threshing 
floor, like one of those mentioned in the Bible 
stories. The flails have been laid aside, for the 
wheat has been threshed and is now gathered on 
big straw mats to dry in the sun. The old 
farmer, whose skin is blackened by exposure to 
many a summer's sun and whose blacker topknot 
sticks straight up from his head like a handle, 
is spreading the wheat back and forth with a 
wooden rake, which is only a board fastened to 
the end of a stick. His shoes are more interest- 
ing than his rake. They are also made of wood 
and are like two little canoes in shape, turning 
up as they do at the toe and the heel. They are 
made for mud, as they stand up on two fittle 
wooden props, but he has gotten into them to 
walk in the wheat that he might not get it dirty. 
xA.las ! he seems to forget that the threshing floor 
was the lounging place for the dogs and the fam- 
ily pig before they began their work and that his 
wife forgot to wash his shoes after the last rain. 
A good many of these farmers wear straw shoes 
made in their homes during the long winter days 
and sometimes leather sandals made out of raw- 
hide, which are fastened round the instep and 
ankles by a leather thong. 



COUNTRY FOLKS. Ill 

What a primitive mill with which to crush the 
wheat or whiten the rice ! The rice, however, is 
generally whitened in a big wooden mortar as 
big as a bushel basket, the grain being pounded 
with a double-headed club four or five feet long, 
skillfully handled by the farmer, but more often 
by his wife. The winnowing of the wheat may 
be left to the boys, as it is a lighter job. Some- 
times the grain is tossed in the air from a big 
shovel and caught again or from a basket held 
in both hands, while the wind blows the chaff 
away and leaves the wheat or rice, as the case 
may be. One would almost think he had been 
on a trip to Palestine or to Mexico. 

It is not always possible to get a peep into a 
Korean house, but permission is given us to do 
it in this case. It happens to be the kitchen, where 
we find the range with three vessels — one for hot 
water, one for cooking rice, and another for 
beans. The Koreans have a curious notion about 
a meddlesome little sprite called the tokgahi. 
Somehow he gets into the house through a crack 
or hole, flies into the kitchen, and then there is 
mischief on hand. They say one of his favorite 
amusem.ents is to bewitch the rice kettle and 
make the cover fall in. It seems impossible for 
such a trick to be played, as the cover is larger 
than the kettle in which the rice is cooked. The 



112 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

explanation has been made that when the cover is 
cold and the vessel, being very thin, gets heated 
up quickly and expands before the cover does the 
latter might possibly fall in. Suspended from 
the eaves of the house near the back door is a 
wisp of straw with which to frighten this sprite 
away, or a bundle of rags may be tied up there 
for the same purpose. When these fail and they 
still have trouble in the kitchen, their only re- 
course, as these poor deluded people believe, is 
to smash up the pots and earthenware vessels and 
pitch them out of doors. 

The mill made of two stones used in the kitch- 
en and worked by two women ( for one generall}- 
pours in the grain while the other turns) makes 
one think again of the Scriptures. Here they are 
making the flour of wheat or barley a little finer 
in their preparation for the family meal. 

The range is fearfully and wonderfully made. 
In the kitchen the meals are cooked over it, and 
in the company room, which may be next to the 
kitchen, the guests who spend the night are also 
pretty well cooked by morning. The heat runs 
from the range through earthen flues under the 
floor of the guest room and other parts of the 
house. During a trip through tlie country sev- 
eral years ago I got so hot in the night I had 
to go out in the court, where the ponies were, to 



COUNTRY FOLKS. 1 13 

cool down ; and we heard of one missionary who 
went to bed with some candles in his pocket and 
dreamed that he was melting. When he woke 
up he was sure that he was melting. Shaking 
himself and putting his hand in his pocket, where 
he felt the hottest (for he had lain down with his 
clothes on, it was so late and he was so tired), 
there was nothing left of the candles but the 
wicks. 

Korean winters are very severe. It is neces- 
sary to provide against them ; hence these stoves 
under the floor. They have not learned how to 
ventilate their houses, either in summer or win- 
ter, and so the belated traveler is likely to get a 
roast at any season of the year. 



8 



XVI. 
THE RUBBER CHURCH. 

The city of Pyeng Yang, far away in the 
north of Korea, is a great missionary center. 
The Presbyterians and Methodists are here side 
by side, working together wnth a beautiful spirit 
in the schools, in the hospitals, and out in the 
evangelistic field. Having heard so much about 
the work here, I could not leave Korea without 
making a visit. 

After a day's ride from Seoul on the train, we 
got off at the station, a mile from the city, and 
were told to get into a street car. We looked 
about us and asked where the car was, thinking 
we might see an electric line or a horse car or 
certainly one with a mule hitched to it. Our mis- 
sionary friend. Mr. Noble, who met us, pointed 
to something like a piano box on wheels, and 
asked us to get in. There were two hard benches 
back to back, and we soon found ourselves on 
one side — four of us — wnth two Japanese and two 
Chinese on the other. It was a funny experience, 
for the seat was so narrow we could hardly sit 
on it, and the car was so small that our feet 



THE RUBBER CHURCH. II5 

dangled over the sides. The question was how 
we were to travel without steam, electricity, or 
horse power. While I was still puzzling over 
the situation two big Korean coolies came up 
from behind, put their bare shoulders to the plat- 
form of the car, and began to push with all their 
might. From a walk they soon got into a trot 
and then a run, and finally as we ran down grade 
in some places it became a wild race. Once in 
a while they would get a foothold, pull themselves 
up, and ride ; but most of the time they were on 
their feet pushing and singing or yelling until it 
sounded as if we had a couple of wild Indians 
after us. This was our introduction to the 
streets of Pyeng Yang. 

From Mr. Noble's front porch we had a splen- 
did view of the river as it wound around the city 
and swept on to the sea. In that very stream, 
and not far away, about forty years ago the en- 
tire crew of a schooner called the ''General Sher- 
man" were murdered by the Koreans. It was 
no wonder they were treated so badly, because 
these men had come, so it was said, to rob and 
plunder the graves of the Korean kings in their 
search for gold. The natives were maddened by 
the presence of the foreigners, whom they dis- 
trusted ; and finally, after firing arrows at them 
in vain and wasting their ammunition (for their 



Il6 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

guns were only matchlocks), they made fire rafts, 
floated them down the river, and burned up the 
intruders' vessel, killing those who escaped to 
the shore. 

Far up the river on the left bank in a peace- 
ful spot there stands a wonderful illustration of 
the power of the gospel. It is what I call the 
"Rubber Church." It belongs to the Presbyte- 
rians and has been built in sections. First, they 
began with a square in the middle of the lot. 
This section held about two hundred and fifty 
people. When it was filled, they built the church 
out on one side and added another section. When 
that was filled, they stretched the church out on 
the opposite side and added another section. And 
the next will be an extension on the north, per- 
haps, and the one following that will be on the 
south. On Sunday afternoon we attended a serv- 
ice in another Presbyterian church, where over 
one thousand men sat on the floor, hymn book in 
hand, and joined in the singing of praise and 
thanksgiving to God until the sound rolled out 
upon the air and swxpt down the stream where 
the fire and flood had consumed their enemies 
only a few years ago. In the congregation that 
afternoon there were earnest Christian men who 
had themselves taken part in the battle with the 
General Sherman. 



THE RUBBER CHURCH. II7 

How odd it is to see a church full of men ev- 
ery Sunday and no women or children ! Even if 
they do have rubber churches, they can't stretch 
them fast enough to hold the Church members 
and the inquirers. The women have their serv- 
ice Sunday morning, there being no room in the 
afternoon, when seven hundred of them meet to 
worship Him who has done so much to give 
peace to their hearts and blessings to their homes. 
There could hardly be a more interesting sight. 
Each woman wears a linen skirt, which has been 
carefully pressed and ironed, with a short white 
sack above that, and a snow-white turban bound 
around her jet-black hair. The children on such 
occasions have green and pink and red trousers 
and jackets, and when they sit together bunched 
up in a group they look for the world like a patch 
of sweet pease, but not quite so fragrant. 

Some of the women who came to the Presby- 
terian Bible School for ten days' study walked 
over one hundred miles with their babies on their 
backs in addition to their bedding and a sack of 
rice or wheat under their arms with which to 
feed themselves that they might be no expense 
to their missionary teachers. It was just such 
earnest women as these whom we saw at Won- 
san coming up to the preacher one Sunday night 
with the rings they had pulled off their fingers. 



Il8 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

asking that he sell them and use the money to 
help pay for the building of their church. 

There are two intensely interesting spots in 
Pyeng Yang. One is the grave of Kija, the no- 
ble Chinaman who centuries ago came to Korea, 
founded this city, taught the people, established 
a government, and conferred upon them many 
blessings which have continued to this day. The 
well which he dug, and which is the far-famed 
''Kija Well/' can still be seen as you go from the 
station to the city. The grave of this great 
statesman, who left his native land and was 
buried in foreign soil, is found near the oldest 
city wall, now little more than a mound of earth. 
It is the oldest of the three city walls belonging 
to the city, and was built by its founder to pro- 
tect the little colony which was the beginning of 
a nation. 

The other spot is the grave of Dr. D. C. 
Rankin, of Nashville, Tenn. He was for a num- 
ber of years Editorial Secretary of the Board of 
Missions of the Southern Presbyterian Church. 
Never was there a sweeter-spirited man. He 
loved children, and was so kind and thoughtful 
that there was not a child who knew him who 
did not trust him absolutely. His kindness to 
animals was such that in their dumb way they 
confided in him as their best friend. 



THE RUBBER CHURCH. 1 19 

One dark night I called to see him when he 
lived on Garland Avenue, back of the Vanderbilt 
University. It had been raining hard. He 
pointed to a very large cat lying on the hearth 
in front of the fire, and said that half an hour 
before he heard a scratching at the door of his 
study. Upon his opening the door the cat walked 
deliberately in to where he had resumed his seat 
and laid on the floor a little kitten which was near- 
ly drowned and which he had picked up out in the 
street. Tom then looked up at him as if to say, 
"Help this poor little waif, for I have done all 
that I can/' licked the kitten on the face, and 
went off to the fire to dry his own coat. The 
Doctor said to me: "How could I resist such an 
appeal as that ?" 

His great heart of love took in the whole 
world. On his table could be found papers pub- 
lished in French with which he was studying the 
condition of the poor African slaves in the Congo 
Free State, and by their side were letters from 
China and Korea, which led him finally to take 
that long journey that he might the better know 
how to lay the needs of the heathen before the 
people of his own Church. Never very strong, 
the strain was too much for him, and he laid 
down his life among the Koreans. It was not a 
life lost. On the other hand, it would seem as 



I20 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

though influences have gone out through his sac- 
rifice, and that of others, which have helped to 
make Pyeng Yang the greatest missionary center 
of Korea — sacrifices that will result in greater 
blessings to the Koreans through the gospel than 
Kija, with all his learning, could ever have hoped 
to confer. 



XVII. 
CANAL LIFE IN CHINA. 

The Grand Canal of China stretches nearly 
five hundred miles from the city of Hangchow 
on the south to within a short distance of Tien- 
tsin on the north. It is wonderful to think of 
this having been dug out with hoes and the dirt 
carried off in baskets on men's shoulders. The 
tens of thousands of coolies at work must have 
looked like so many ants. Out from this great 
waterway on each side are smaller canals, 
which run in every direction until they form a 
network of water connecting every village and 
every town in the lower valley of the Yang-tse 
River. 

Upon these canals are to be seen big house 
boats owned by mandarins, with banners flying, 
a gong to be beaten on the bow, and a yellow 
dragon flag flying from the stern. The next one 
we meet may be a tiny mail boat propelled by a 
man in the stern, who rows with his feet, paddles 
with his hands, steers with another small paddle 
under his arm, and can actually smoke a pipe 
while he is doing all three. In addition to the 

(121) 



122 SIDE LIGHTS OX THE ORIENT. 

mail, this boat can carry one or two passengers, 
provided they lie down and keep perfectly still. 
To sit up any length of time and not turn over, 
one must almost have his hair parted in the mid- 
dle. One foreigner who was obliged to ride in 
a mail boat and who chewed tobacco said he was 
afraid to change his quid from one side of his 
mouth to the other. 

The Ningpo boats have large staring eyes, one 
on each side of the bow. Upon being asked why 
these eyes are necessary, a Chinaman replied in 
pigeon English : 

No got eyes, no can see; 

No can see, no can savvy; 

No can savvy, how can niakee walkee water. 

The word ''savvy" means understand. 

There is much about the Chinese boats which 
makes one think of a fish. The bow of the boat 
may have the eyes just mentioned; in the stern 
of the boat is the yulozv, made like a fish's tail. 
by which the boat is propelled ; on each side 
near the middle of many of the sailboats is a 
broad board six or eight feet long, which looks 
like a fin and is let down in the water to prevent 
being capsized; while the sails, especially about 
Hongkong and Canton, stand up like the dorsal 
fins of a perch. In the spring of every year there 



CANAL LIFE IN CHINA. I23 

is the dragon boat festival, when a number of 
craft, highly painted, are launched upon the ca- 
nals ; and these to the simple country people, who 
flock by the hundreds to the scene in their holi- 
day dress, are made to look as though they were 
monsters of the deep just come to the surface 
for their benefit. 

There are many ways to catch fish^ but one of 
the most curious is by the use of cormorants. 
These are large birds with black feathers and 
wings, long bills, keen eyes, and a pouch-like 
throat. The fisherman who owns the cormorants 
has trained them from the time they were small. 
They are fond of fish, and he began by throwing 
them into the canal, where they would dive in- 
stantly upon sighting their prey, but would be 
pulled back to the boat by the string which had 
been fastened to their legs. When once they 
have acquired the habit of catching fish quickly 
and returning to their master, the string is taken 
off, an iron ring is fastened around the neck, and 
then they are ready to serve him as his most 
trusty servants. He flings them into the canal; 
they swiftly disappear, then come to the surface 
and are lifted by the fisherman up to the side of 
the boat on the end of a bamboo ; then comes the 
most interesting part of the process. The cormo- 
rant is allowed to swallow every fish that will go 



124 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

down his throat. Fish above a certain size he 
cannot swallow on account of the ring, try as 
hard as he may. The fisherman catches the bird 
by the neck, chokes him until he opens his mouth, 
and pulls the half-swallowed fish out by the tail. 

It is estimated that ten million people in China 
live on the water. How they manage to get a 
living is difficult to explain when one finds three 
generations in a single boat. We passed one 
that was really a floating farm. There was a 
cow in the bow of the boat with an iron ring 
through her nose and a rope attached to the ring, 
which held her fast, or by means of which one of 
the boys led her out to eat grass along the bank. 
Next came two pigs, fed and cared for in a lit- 
tle space about four feet wide and six feet long. 
Then came the middle room, occupied by the 
grandfather and grandmother. The next room 
back of them contained the father and mother, 
and with them were the four or five sons and 
daughters who helped take care of the stock, 
cook the food, and row the boat. Far back on 
the stern was the big bamboo basket in which 
the chickens were being raised, and swimming 
about on the canal a flock of ducks that had been 
hatched from eggs kept warm in the cotton- 
padded quilts of the farmer and his wife, and 
some of them carried about in the bosom of the 



CANAL LIFE IN CHINA. 125 

old grandmother, who had no other occupation 
left her but to hatch chickens and ducks. Far 
in the distance beyond the three boats upon 
which we saw the cormorants sitting quietly 
for a resting spell is the beautiful sixty-three- 
arch marble bridge which runs along the Grand 
Canal beyond the city of Soochow. 

The city is situated in the center of a great 
plain, w^hich is filled with canals teeming with 
life. In addition to the gateways through which 
travelers enter the city and reach its thorough- 
fares, there are the many water gates which 
connect the inner with the outer moat and 
through which boats can reach the heart of the 
city and go out in every direction to the villages 
beyond. It is thus that opportunities are given 
to reach the Chinese everywhere by water as 
well as by land. 



XVIII. 
THE KING OF THE THIEVES. 

There is a proverb which runs: "Set a thief 
to catch a thief." I did not know that there was a 
King of the Thieves until our house in Shanghai 
was robbed the third time, and it became neces- 
sary to take unusual measures in order to stop 
these depredations. A number of things were 
taken each time, but the last night the thief came 
he entered the bedroom of two American gentle- 
men, took what he could lay his hands upon, 
and the next morning they failed to come to 
breakfast because they had no trousers to put on. 
This was the straw that broke the camel's back, 
and a messenger was promptly sent summoning 
the King of the Thieves himself. i\t first he re- 
fused to come, and denied all knowledge of the 
case ; but threats of the police brought him to his 
senses, and His Royal Highness came in person 
with several attendants. 

Imagine a man weighing 250 pounds, with 
only one eye, without any ears, with a great gash 
across the back of his neck, with a deep red 
scar over one cheek, with only a thumb and two 

(126) 



THE KING OF THE THIEVES. \2J 

fingers on one hand, and the loss of two fingers 
from the other. He was lame and had to ride 
on horseback or in a chair because the tendons 
above his heels had been cut in two at one time 
as a punishment. These slashes and scars, to- 
gether with the loss of his e3^e and ears, had 
grown out of fights, captures, torture, and hair- 
breadth escapes almost without number. It was 
marvelous that such a man should have been al- 
lowed by the Chinese authorities to remain at 
liberty. In any other country he would have 
been securely locked up and imprisoned for life. 
But as the Chinese police force is ineffective, and 
this man had given up the business of stealing 
himself, he was permitted to become the King 
of the Thieves in order either to help the offi- 
cials to catch other thieves that were not of his 
gang or recover property when it had been 
stolen. 

A long palaver followed his examination of the 
house and of the rooms from which the stolen 
goods had been taken, the King all the time de- 
claring that his men had no hand in the business, 
but that it was done by others. At this juncture 
one of the gentlemen who had lost his clothing, 
seeing several gold rings on the fingers of one 
of the King's lieutenants, seized the hand, pulled 
the rings off, put them in his pocket, and said 



128 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

they would not be given back until the stolen 
property was restored. The plan worked like a 
charm. The next morning the two pairs of trou- 
sers reappeared, including what was in the pock- 
ets, and, in fact, everything else that had been 
taken. 

So skillful was one of the professional thieves 
in Canton considered that a wager was laid be- 
tween two Europeans that he could steal the 
sheet from under a man while he was in bed. 
The thief was sent for and was promised a hand- 
some present if he could get the sheet without 
waking the other man up. In the morning he 
came back with a smiling face, with the sheet 
folded up in his hand. Upon being asked how 
he did it, his reply was that he had tickled the 
unconscious sleeper with a straw. Every time he 
moved an arm or a leg he would pull on the sheet ; 
and finally getting him where he could make him 
turn over by the use of the straw, he pulled the 
sheet out altogether. 

One form of punishment when a thief is 
caught is to put a board around his neck with 
a piece of paper pasted on the board giving the 
time and place where the theft occurred and a 
description of the articles stolen. Sometimes sev- 
eral are chained together and made to stand up 
as^ainst the wall on the side of the street 



THE KING OF THE THIEVES. I29 

where the passers-by can see them. The board 
is called a kangite, is very heavy, prevents ly- 
ing down, and sometimes is so large that the 
hand cannot be lifted to the mouth in taking 
food. In the case of highway robbers the kaiigue 
is fastened to the top of a wooden cage, which is 
so high that the robber can only stand on his 
toes, and there he hangs by his head until he 
starves to death. 

One of the signs of better days in the Chinese 
Empire is an imperial edict to abolish death by 
such torture. It belongs to heathenism, and is 
a remnant of a barbaric age. With the entrance 
of a gospel of mercy and of a Christian civiHza- 
tion, the old methods will disappear and a more 
humane treatment of criminals prevail. In Ja- 
pan these reforms have already accomplished 
much, and we may expect similar results in China 
within a few years. 
9 



XIX. 
'BEGGING A BUSINESS. 

The Chinese are not a lazy people. On the 
other hand, the millions who make up the Chi- 
nese Empire are industrious, frugal, and willing 
to work if they can get it. Where there are so 
many, however, it is difficult to make a living, 
and there must necessarily be a great deal of 
poverty. There are special causes of the poverty 
which exists, such as the frequent floods caused 
by the Yellow River overrunning its banks or 
changing its channel; these come so often that 
the river is called "China's Sorrow." Then there 
are famines, such as the one through which Cen- 
tral China passed in 1906. Probably half a 
million people starved to death, and half a mil- 
lion more, many of them women and children, 
were left without homes and without food. 
Again, the widespread use of opium has impov- 
erished many and brought the smokers or their 
families to beggary. 

Begging in China has been reduced to a sci- 
ence. It makes one think of Brazil, where in 
certain sections the country is divided up, and 




PRINCE OF BEGGARS. 



BEGGING A BUSINESS. I3I 

the beggars come round regularly on horseback 
to get their weekly fee. The Chinese have a 
King of the Beggars in some cities, who divides 
the town into districts, appoints his assistant beg- 
gars to their respective places, gives them his 
card or a slip of paper showing that they are au- 
thorized, and in return for a share in what they 
receive he gives them a shelter and sometimes 
provides tea and clothing. 

One of the most picturesque figures is that of 
a professional beggar in Shanghai in his winter 
rig. He not only has on a coat of many colors, 
but it is made up of the coats of many animals. 
There are probably the skins of half a dozen cats, 
one dozen rats, and several dogs in its make-up. 
The interesting part of it all is that cats, rats, 
and dogs furnished him a number of meals, which 
he greatly enjoyed, before he made a double use 
of them by wearing their skins. 

"Once a beggar, always a beggar," is an old 
saying. Whether this is true or not, long-con- 
tinued begging produces a habit and leads to 
much ingenuity in thinking up devices for trick- 
ing the public. A man came one day to a mis- 
sionary holding out his right hand, with the palm 
turned up, and pointing to the wrist, where there 
was a fearful gash which extended through the 
tendons and blood vessels. Out of sympathy. 



132 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

enough money was given him to last several days. 
At the end of a week he returned, asking for 
more help and again showing his wrist. The mis- 
sionary's suspicions were aroused because there 
had been no change in the wound. He grasped 
the beggar's arm vigorously. The latter tried 
hard to get away, and in the struggle which en- 
sued a casing of flesh-colored wax, with red 
paint to represent blood, fell off of his wrist, 
which was in as good condition as that of the 
other arm. 

Recently while in Soochow an old Chinaman, 
staff in hand, came to Dr. Park's hospital gate 
asking alms. The Doctor had seen him several 
times before, and, knowing his accomplishments, 
told us to stand near by and see the old fellow 
perform. Dr. Park then told him that he could 
give him no money until he cried. At first he 
said he could not cry, but the reply was: "You 
cried like a good fellow when you came before, 
and you surely haven't forgotten how." With 
that the old professional bent himself over, be- 
gan to work his face and knit his brows, then 
turned his eyes upward, and with a whine in his 
voice the tears actually filled the corners of his 
eyes and chased each other down his cheeks. It 
was the same day that another beggar, a younger 
man, came to the Doctor begging for money. 



BEGGING A BUSINESS. I33 

He was about to hand him a few copper cash 
when the saucy fellow straightened up and, with 
an air of independence, said : ''You had better 
give me two dollars instead of a few cents; if 
you do, you will get rid of me, for I'll promise 
not to come again in six months or a year." 

There is a school for beggars in which they 
are taught how to impose on different classes of 
people ; how to put lime in their own eyes in or- 
der to produce blindness ; how to tie a string 
around the foot above the ankle and let it cut 
into the flesh gradually until the foot drops off, 
so that the raw stump and bone can be shown 
to the public as the beggar sits by the roadside; 
and women are taught how to paste grains of 
soft-boiled rice on the faces and bodies of little 
children to imitate an eruption of smallpox. The 
child is laid on a piece of cloth by the roadside 
in expectation of passers-by tossing a copper cash 
for its relief. 

While in the city of Peking years ago in charge 
of a hospital I had the honor of being elected the 
honorary physician to the "Beggars' Refuge." 
Of course I accepted, thinking it would be an op- 
portunity to do good and reach some poor crea- 
tures who could not otherwise be helped. The 
first suggestion to be made was that of a bath 
tub with a wooden bottom on the inside and iron 



134 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

on the outside, so that a fire could be made un- 
der the tub, thus heating the water and giving 
the beggars a much-needed hot bath. They se- 
riously objected on the score of danger to their 
lives, as many of them had not bathed for ten 
years. 

My first patient v^as brought to me as deaf 
as a post. Upon examination I found his ears 
stopped up with Peking dust and dirt, which 
was packed into a solid cake. An hour's work 
with warm water, soap, and a syringe opened up 
one ear, and another hour the second ear. As 
soon as hearing had been restored and he was 
positive of the fact he began to dance about the 
room (for this man was not anxious to be deaf), 
and then running to his comrades he told them 
that a miracle had been worked, for he had not 
been able to hear for months. My reputation 
was made, objections to the bath tub were with- 
drawn, and soon I had the pleasure of seeing my 
beggars washed and clean for once in their lives, 
and without any serious results. 

These wretched people are not without grati- 
tude. Dr. M. T. Yates, the great Baptist mis- 
sionary who lived for so many years in Shanghai, 
saved the life of a poor fellow who had laid him- 
self down to die at the Doctor's gate. The mis- 
sionary by prompt treatment relieved him from 



BEGGING A BUSINESS. I35 

the attack of Asiatic cholera, with the result that 
the beggar returned ten days after, pledging the 
missionary that when they went to heaven he 
would become his donkey and let the Doctor 
ride him. 



XX. 

STRAW AND BAMBOO. 

One hardly knows which to admire most, the 
ingenuity or the economy of the Chinese. They 
can make almost anything with their nimble fin- 
gers out of the very simplest and cheapest mate- 
rial, and at the same time they are obliged to 
economize by making a little go a long way. 

It has interested me much to see what a China- 
man can make out of rice straw. The sandals 
worn by the farmer are made by his wife or by 
himself on rainy days or during the winter when 
he cannot work in the cold. Down on the dirt 
floor they patiently sit by the hour or upon low 
stools, rubbing and twisting the straw into cords, 
which are skillfully woven into sandals, which 
protect the feet and are easily fastened on by 
strings made of the same material, which pass 
between the great toe and the next one, run over 
the instep, and are tied around the ankle. All of 
this for less than one cent, and it makes a shoe 
which may last for a week or can be used for a 
thirty-mile walk. 

One morning while our boat was Iving at an- 

(136) 



STRAW AND BAMBOO. 1 37 

chor In the canal near the town of Wang-Doo a 
Chinese friend came aboard with a present of a 
string of crabs. There were ten in the strings 
all alive, as they had been caught only a few 
hours before, all working their legs in the most 
vigorous manner, and spitting out foam and bub- 
bles until the whole seemed to be covered with 
soapsuds. He held the string in his hand, and 
it consisted of four straws twisted together. The 
crabs were held as easily as if each had been 
tied with a piece of twine. In the same village 
you can literally see eggs sold by the yard. Each 
egg is held in a little oval made of straw. A twist 
at the end of each oval holds the strands tightly 
together, and thus the market man can hold up 
before your very eyes a string of eggs as long as 
your arm. 

Walking along the banks of the canals, the 
harness with which the buffalo is hitched to the 
plow or to the water mill is probably of straw. 
The farmer's hat may be made of the same ma- 
terial; and in Japan the women working in the 
rice fields under the hot sun wear on their backs 
a straw mat or shield which covers almost the 
entire body and makes them look like snails 
crawling through the mud. In the same country 
the ox, who carries heavy burdens, toiling up 
the rocky mountain sides, instead of being shod 



138 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

with iron as in Korea, has a straw shoe carefully 
bound by his owner over his feet to keep him 
from slipping. 

Speaking of the rice field, either in China or 
Japan, the most interesting sight is that of the 
farmer, who on a rainy day is obliged to don 
his raincoat and continue the work of irrigating 
his fields. He looks for the world like a porcu- 
pine, for his wife has taken hundreds of straws, 
run a big needle with a strong thread or string 
through the butt ends, and has made this into a 
cape, which he fastens around his neck and per- 
haps another around his waist. Apart from the 
looks of the thing (for he looks like a hedge- 
hog or the thatched roof of a house), the garment 
is as secure a waterproof as one made of rubber. 

A fair quality of paper is made of straw, bas- 
kets for charcoal carried on the backs of moun- 
taineers several days' journey, mats to sit on, 
mats to cover with (the latter much used by the 
beggars) ; food is cooked with straw by millions 
of Chinese, for they cannot afford any other fuel ; 
chickens and pigs are tied with it as they are car- 
ried to market ; and to cap the climax, the ingen- 
ious Chinese make traps with it with which to 
catch fleas. These traps consist of a little straw 
box with two or three straws split half in two 
leading up to the box from the floor, with the 




CORMORANT FISHING. 




FISHING IN STRAW HOUSES ON BAMBOO POLES. 



STRAW AND BAMBOO. 139 

white or Inside of the split straws uppermost. 
The flea is fond of exercise and likes to jump on 
anything white. He leaps on the straw, which 
attracts him, makes another jump toward the 
box, and lands with his feet tangled up in the 
birdlime or glue which has been smeared on the 
edge of the box, and there he sticks like "Brer 
Rabbit" when he struck the "Tar Baby." 

Bamboo. 

The bamboo in Oriental countries is more use- 
ful than any other substance. At all events it 
has a greater variety of uses. Oil jars are made 
out of it by cutting off a section and knocking 
out one or two of the joints. The ox (or water 
buffalo) which draws the water mill or grinds the 
millet is blinded by having a piece of curved bam- 
boo placed over each eye while at work. The 
Chinaman and the Japanese as well as the Korean 
eat with chopsticks made of this substance, and, 
singularly enough, bamboo shoots are eaten by 
them. The latter must be cut when they are 
tender just as they appear above the ground. 
Boiled and cooked with a little milk, these shoots 
are a very palatable dish. 

Bamboo implements and utensils are found on 
every farm, from the hoe handle and the rake 



140 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

to the water pipes that help to irrigate the rice 
fields by bringing the water from some mountain 
stream or spring. Frequently the house and much 
of its furniture are made of bamboo. The fam- 
ily may sit on bamboo stools, eat off of a bamboo 
table with bamboo chopsticks (as already indi- 
cated), and hang their clothes on bamboo pegs or 
fold them away in a wardrobe made of the same 
material. If the farmery's son writes a letter, he 
does it with a camel's-hair brush fastened in a 
bamboo handle; if his daughter tries to fan out 
the flies or mosquitoes, she may do it with a bam- 
boo fan (but they come back again, because they 
find a refuge near by in the bamboo grove which 
shades the house and beautifies the place) ; if her 
father is better off than most farmers and can 
afford it, she binds her feet to be admired by the 
young men of the neighborhood, and her feet are 
called the "waving bamboo" because they are sup- 
posed to be so graceful. Fortunately for the girl, 
this custom is going out of style. 

Another custom which I am glad to say is a 
thing of the past is that of impaling a prisoner 
who has been condemned to die by fastening him 
on the ground over a bamboo shoot. At least 
this was one of the terrible modes of torture in- 
flicted by heathen people. The shoot is so sharp 
as it comes out of the ground and grows so fast 



STRAW AND BAMBOO. I4I 

that it will pass up through the body in a day or 
so if the victim is held to the ground during that 
time. 

One of the interesting sights in a Chinese city 
is a traveling restaurant made of cane. This is 
carried on a man's back, being In two parts, each 
fastened on the end of a bamboo pole thrown 
across his shoulder. For two cents you can buy 
a bowl of soup, a mess of crawfish, a meal of rice, 
or a couple of eggs fried in oil. One of the most 
common sounds at night is the regular beat of 
the watchman with his stick on a hollow bam- 
boo as he makes his rounds. This he does to 
scare away the thieves and to let his employer 
know that he is wide awake and that "all Is 
well." 



XXI. 

THE STRAITS OF MALACCA. 

The southern tip of the continent of Asia is 
long and narrow like a finger pointing toward 
the south. Just below the end of this continen- 
tal finger, and lying somewhat aslant across it, is 
the long island of Sumatra. The sea between 
these is called the Straits of Malacca, taking 
the name from the Malay Peninsula. Every 
steamer from China bound for London via the 
Suez Canal passes through these Straits, first 
stopping at Singapore on the Pacific side and 
then at Penang on the Indian Ocean side. 

Leaving Hongkong, with its stately Victoria 
Peak lifted up into the sky far to the north, the 
beautiful sunsets on our right over Tongking and 
Cochin China and the lovely moonrises on our 
left toward the Philippines and the island of Bor- 
neo made the closing hours of the day very at- 
tractive as we stood on the deck watching the 
one go down and the other come up. It was the 
many lights twinkling along the shore that told 
us we were about to drop anchor near Singapore. 
The next morning we steamed into the inner har- 
(142) 



THE STRAITS OF MALACCA. 1 43 

bor, with islands on every side of us covered with 
tropical verdure. We knew that we wxre within 
one hundred miles of the equator, but the deep, 
dark shade of palm and banana trees made the 
shores seem to be the most delightful of resting 
places. 

We had hardly cast anchor off the pier be- 
fore a half dozen canoes shot alongside with 
one or two boys in each, ready, like those at 
Honolulu, to dive for a small piece of silver 
and even for a penny. Throw as hard as we 
might, the coin would never get ten feet below 
the surface before one of these expert swimmers 
would catch and land it safely in his mouth. But 
the most amusing thing about these fellows was 
their playing a game of tennis on the water. A 
white rubber ball tossed from the paddle of the 
first boy would be caught on the paddle of the 
second, pitched to the third, struck back again, 
and so on, with as much ease as if they had been 
on their feet on mother earth. 

How we wished for some way in which we 
could have carried home with us the beautiful 
shells and lovely coral which Hterally filled a 
canoe paddled from a neighboring island, where 
these specimens had just been found! It seemed 
as though every shape and every color had been 
utilized in the beautifying of these delicate little 



144 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT, 

houses which had been occupied by the denizens 
of the deep. One dollar in American money 
might have bought the lot, and possibly the canoe 
thrown in ; but where could we have stowed them 
away ? 

A gharry ride to the Botanical Gardens is a 
treat every passenger enjoys. The gharry is a 
four-wheeled, closed carriage, with blinds in- 
stead of curtains in order to keep out the sun, 
but to let in the breeze. The pony is not larger 
than a Shetland, but is capable of any amount of 
travel, and does not seem to share the lazy look 
of the natives, who are content if they can get a 
dish of curry and some fruit and spend the day 
in the shade. 

The Gardens are very extensive, carefully kept, 
and are supplied with trees and plants from al- 
most every portion of the tropical world. There 
are royal palms from Cuba with their ostrich-like 
plumes, date palms from Arabia, sago palms from 
the South Sea Islands, the kauri pine from New 
Zealand with a leaf like the oleander but with 
the rough bark of the pine tree. The most beau- 
tiful of all was a bank of maidenhair fern, twen- 
ty feet long and four feet high; while the most 
startling and attractive was a great tree which is 
called the "Flame of the Forest." This is the 
Royal Poinciana from the island of Madagascar, 



THE STRAITS OF MALACCA. I45 

which fairly blazes like a flame of fire. Venus's 
flytrap is a little plant which is found in the 
swamps of North Carolina. It has two leaves 
or segments facing each other which are supplied 
with needles or spines. The moment a fly or in- 
sect lights upon this sensitive surface the leaves 
fold together, imprisoning the poor little unfor- 
tunate and sucking the very lifeblood out of him. 
Then tlie two halves, having completed their meal, 
open once more, get rid of the body of the victim, 
and are ready for another. 

Two days' steaming around the end of the 
Malay Peninsula and we are at Penang. A shout 
from the captain just before we arrived called 
our attention to a fishing boat directly in our 
way, which would have been run down had our 
steamer not suddenly changed her course. As we 
swept by the fisherman put out his head, and we 
saw that he had been fast asleep and ignorant of 
the danger. 

Only four hours' stop, but we make good use 
of it by pulling ashore in a curious little painted 
boat, with the bow turned up like the toe of a 
Turkish slipper and the stern divided into two 
parts like the tail and wings of a swallow. On 
our way to the wharf we passed a boat with at 
least four thousand cocoanuts on it, and in the 
fruit shops we saw men drinking the cocoanut 
10 



146 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

milk, which in the fresh cocoanut is sweet and 
nourishing. A run into the market gives us a 
peep at curious-looking white egg plants, the lar- 
gest bamboo shoots we ever saw, great piles of 
ginger to be candied or made into preserves, and 
bushels of shrimp and shellfish. The tables for 
fish are made of tiles with grooves between them. 
Each table slants a little downward, so that tiny 
streams of water running out at the top can run 
along the grooves and keep the fish wet and cool. 
The funny thing about it all is that the Chinaman 
who sells the fish or shrimp sits on a block of 
wood in the middle of the table and seems not to 
care a fig for the water running under and about 
him. 

Curious houses these Malay people live in, with 
roofs made of rushes or palm leaves, the sides of 
mats, and the whole thing on stilts of bamboo or 
wood so high above the ground that they have 
to go up a ladder to get into the house. 

The way they dress is more curious still. The 
men frequently have red calico skirts wrapped 
around them, but with nothing on above the 
waist except a turban or a fez cap on the head. 
For an ornament one fellow had a ring on his 
big toe, and a woman, as if to offset him, in ad- 
dition to the light shawl over her shoulders and 
head and the usual skirt, had bored a hole in the 



THE STRAITS OF MALACCA. 1 47 

side of her nose and fastened a silver brooch into 
it the size of a quarter of a dollar. 

Returning to the wharf to catch our steamer, 
we passed tall mango trees on the right and the 
"Traveler's Palm" on the other side of the street. 
This is the most interesting palm of all. It re- 
ceived its name from the fact that when thirsty 
a traveler can climb to the top, cut off the stem, 
scoop out a hole, and in a few minutes find it full 
of water with which he can quench his thirst. 



XXII. 
JUGGLERS AND SNAKE CHARMERS. 

The island of Ceylon is like a pear in shape, 
hanging down in the Indian Ocean, with its stem 
toward the north and near the coast of India. 
The upper part of the pear is so near India that 
the strait between the two can almost be crossed 
on the shallow reef, which is called "Adam's 
Bridge." There is a mountain in the center of 
the island called "Adam's Peak." On this moun- 
tain, impressed in the rock, is Adam's foot. I 
suppose this gave the name to the mountain. He 
must have been a giant, for the impression of the 
foot shown in the Buddhist Dagoba at Kandy, the 
capital, is over a yard long. Eve must have been 
left behind when her husband came over here, 
because we hear nothing of her at all. 

As our steamer passed through the magnifi- 
cent breakwater and dropped anchor in the har- 
bor of Colombo we realized how wise it was in 
the English government to build the sea wall of 
concrete which keeps the thundering billows of 
the Indian Ocean from interfering with this now 
quiet anchorage. Even the five boys on a raft 

(148) 



JUGGLERS AND SNAKE CHARMERS. I49 

of four cocoanut logs, who came alongside sing- 
ing a song and clapping their hands to keep time, 
did not have to guard themselves against the 
waves. But they were just as ready as those of 
Singapore and Honolulu to dive for a piece of 
money. They must have had a thriving business, 
for into this crossroads of the East Indies there 
are steamers from England, France, Germany, 
Australia, Arabia, China, and Japan. Who 
would have thought that a little island only 270 
miles long and 140 miles broad, occupied at one 
time by wild tribes called the Veddas, would 
furnish one of the world's great ports with its 
banks, hotels, churches, schools, street cars, auto- 
mobiles, and everything else that goes to make 
up a city? 

We had not been at our hotel on the beach 
half an hour before the jugglers and snake charm- 
ers came on the lawn to amuse the guests. The 
first fellow, instead of being a fire eater, pro- 
fessed to be able to kindle a fire inside of him. 
Like the others, he was tall, lean, hollow-eyed, 
black-skinned, with a turban on his head and 
nothing on his body above his waist. He now 
hops on one foot and then on the other in an 
unaccountable way. No one knows what is going 
to happen. His movements get quicker ; he puts 
his hand on his stomach as if in pain, with his 



150 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

eyes almost starting from his head, and then, 
bending over toward the gentleman who was sit- 
ting on the steps nearest to him, you really begin 
to see the smoke coming out of his mouth and 
nose. He straightens up and seems to feel bet- 
ter. Then he bends over again, and there comes 
another puflf of smoke. The man seems actually 
to be on fire and needs a bucket of water 
poured into him to put it out. This goes on for 
some time, and then without a word all of a sud- 
den the smoke ceases, the fire goes out, and the 
juggler, immensely relieved, passes his hat for 
some coin. 

A second man comes up on the porch, squats 
dow^n on the hard floor, gets out his few little 
things, and goes to work. Many are the won- 
derful things he does. But I will describe only 
one of the most interesting. A pile of sand, 
enough to fill a hat, is poured out upon the floor. 
He beats the sand with a rag doll, which squeaks 
and groans. He then talks to the doll in some 
sort of jargon we cannot understand, and the 
doll seems to give its orders to the sand, after 
which the latter is covered with a cloth. The 
juggler's arms and body are bare, so that he can- 
not introduce anything under that cloth without 
our seeing it. The sand had all been spread out 
before it was heaped up, so we knew there was 



JUGGLERS AND SNAKE CHARMERS. I5I 

nothing" in that. He extends one hand, lifts up 
a corner of the cloth, peeps under it, gets off 
some more of his mysterious words, looks de- 
lighted, throws off the cloth, and there is a little 
green leaf which has just pushed its way up 
through the sand. We all believe the leaf is sim- 
ply stuck down there, and see nothing remarkable 
about it. The cloth goes on again, the doll re- 
ceives a beating and dances around like a sprite, 
the cloth is rising up, and when he throws it off a 
second time a little shoot has come up, with sev- 
eral fresh leaves on it. On goes the cloth again, 
and then off for the third and last time, after 
which we see it rise up, and now we rub our eyes 
with amazement, for a little mango tree has ac- 
tually grown up out of the sand and is standing 
there a foot high. One gentleman cries out: "I 
bet it is only a stem and has no root." The jug- 
gler understands enough English to pull up the 
tree and show the half dozen roots which had 
spread themselves through the sand. Then his 
triumph was complete, and all agreed that he had 
earned his money. 

The snake charmer was the third man, and re- 
mained out on the lawn. First, he gave an exhi- 
bition of a little boy who could twist himself 
into all sorts of shapes, making two loops by 
crossing his hands and feet and then passing 



152 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

his feet and legs over his head and around his 
arms until you wondered if he would ever get 
straight again. Then bending his head down 
toward his heels until they almost touched, the 
man lifted the boy up in mid-air, balanced him 
on the end of a bamboo stuck in the middle of 
his back, and while still bent over backward grad- 
ually raised the boy high above our heads until 
the lower end of the bamboo stood on the jug- 
gler's chin. This done, he walked about on the 
grass until he was ready to lower his burden amid 
the applause of those who saw it. 

A basket at his feet was opened and showed 
a large snake curled up. He struck the snake, 
when it shot up its head and body, at the same 
time spreading a kind of hood about its neck 
and head. This was the deadly cobra. He struck 
it again, and it struck back at him, being very 
angry. Getting out a little flageolet, he played 
softly, when the snake relaxed its hood and sank 
back in the basket perfectly still. The cobra is 
the deadliest serpent in India and Ceylon. In the 
temples one frequently sees an image of Buddha 
with the cobra erect behind it with its head and 
hood arching over the image. This grows out 
of a tradition that Buddha while in the forest 
was protected by the snake, and so the Buddhist 
holds it in great reverence. Along the roads on 



JUGGLERS AND SNAKE CHARMERS. 1 53 

this island large ant-hills are pointed out with 
one or two holes near the base. The natives say 
this snake, finding the ant-hill a place to his lik- 
ing, makes his home there whether the ants want 
him or not. 

Our snake charmer on the lawn now opens a 
bag, and out comes a little four-footed animal, 
with a long, narrow head, tapering nose, and 
sharp teeth. It is the mongoose, the fiercest ene- 
my of the cobra. While he is held by the cord 
tied around his neck^ the charmer strikes the 
snake several times, angers him, and then pulls 
up the mongoose. The latter, not one bit afraid, 
flies at the cobra, and as quick as a flash fastens 
his teeth in the snake's under jaw. It takes a 
sharp lick to separate them, for they roll over 
on the grass in deadly combat. The mongoose 
runs back into his bag, still showing his teeth, and 
the charmer plays on his flageolet with all his 
might until the venomous serpent is safely cov- 
ered with the top of the basket. It is a rare sight, 
but one does not care to see it a second time. 



XXIII. 
BUDDHA'S TOOTH. 

In the city of Kandy, which is seventy-five 
miles by rail from Colombo, there stands the 
Maligawa Temple, which is supposed to contain 
Buddha's tooth. Ordinarily the tooth cannot be 
seen, as it is held by a lotus flower of pure gold, 
hidden under seven bell-shaped metal shrines, each 
shrine being set with jewels and precious stones of 
great value. Once a year, and sometimes on great 
festival occasions, the tooth is brought out and 
carried through the streets in a shrine under a 
canopy on the back of an elephant. 

This sacred object was brought from India 
to Ceylon nearly 1,700 years ago by the Princess 
of Kalinga, who hid it in the folds of her hair. 
Nearly 700 years ago the Malabars carried it 
back to India, after which it was once more re- 
stored to Ceylon and hidden away. A few years 
after Columbus discovered America the Portu- 
guese found the tooth and took it to Goa, where it 
was burned by the Archbishop in the presence of 
the Viceroy and his court. Another was soon 
manufactured out of a piece of ivory two inches 

(154) 



BUDDHA S TOOTH. 155 

long and less than an inch thick. This is what is 
now in the temple at Kandy, and is the object of 
worship which attracts devotees from every part 
of the Buddhist world. 

Gautama, the founder of Buddhism, was born 
in India nearly 500 years before Christ. He was 
a prince and lived like any other man of wealth 
and power who had never given any serious 
thought to life here or hereafter. One day he 
began to think so seriously about the evil, the 
pain, and the sorrow of this world that he re- 
solved to give up his kingdom and his home and 
become a wanderer far away from the haunts of 
men. In the hours of his loneliness and self- 
denial he thought out his philosophy of life. It 
was this : All existence involves pain and suffer- 
ing, all suffering is caused by desire, the cessa- 
tion of suffering will follow the extinction of 
desire, and the extinction of desire will be ac- 
complished by perseverance in the eightfold path 
— namely, right beliefs, right resolves, right 
speech, right work, right livelihood, right train- 
ing, right-mindfulness, and right mental concen- 
tration. 

Some of these things sound very good, but how 
are we to accomplish them unless some person 
greater than ourselves can give us the power 
to do it? Then the end of it all, with Gautama's 



156 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

reasoning, was to think and concentrate your- 
self into Nirvana, which means extinction of the 
life of the body and of the life of the soul. This 
would be going out into outer darkness and utter 
nothingness. 

Buddhism was once the great religion of India, 
but now there are only 9,000,000 in that country. 
It is much stronger in Ceylon, Siam, China, and 
Japan, where it is most active. It made us 
sad at heart to see the poor devotees, most of 
them old men and women, bowing down before a 
shrine which contained nothing but the imitation 
of a tooth, and it looks, it is said, more like that 
of a crocodile than that of a man. And yet there 
they were, burning candles and incense, offering 
basketfuls of beautiful white jasmine flowers 
which filled the air with fragrance, and bending 
low as they kneeled upon the hard stone pave- 
ment, repeating in an undertone praises to "Lord 
Buddha." Two of the women were pilgrims who 
had come by land and sea from far-away Burma 
to make their offerings to and receive blessings 
from this miserable relic. 

Bishop Thoburn states the case very clearly 
when he says that Christianity teaches all of the 
moral virtues of Buddhism and fills up its awful 
vacancy with a living, personal God. He adds: 
"Christianity has a Saviour; Budhism casts each 



BUDDHA S TOOTH. 1 57 

individual upon his own helplessness. Chris- 
tianity is a revelation of hope; Buddhism, a re- 
ligion of despair. Gautama offers only death; 
Christ offers life and immortality." 

There are several very large elephants belong- 
ing to this temple which can be seen every after- 
noon having a bath in the river. It is a pity that 
more of the followers of Gautama did not follow 
their example. Late one evening I saw two of 
these elephants grazing about in the inclosure 
across the street from the temple and almost un- 
der the great bo tree, in the shade of which 
Gautama had his seat in the forest. 

These animals are so intelligent and so strong 
that anything concerning them seems interesting. 
Bishop Wilson says he has seen them at work in 
the sawmills of Burma, rolling logs and lifting 
timbers with as much sense and with far more 
ease than the men. On this island they are trained 
to drive wild elephants into the kraal. Once in 
the inclosure, the tame elephants go in among the 
wild ones, help the hunters to tie the hind legs 
of their big companions to the trees, and then 
will go on each side of a captured animal and 
rub and pet him with their trunks until he be- 
comes quiet. 

In the museum at Colombo is a huge stone 
lion on the back of which was placed the throne 



I5B SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

of one of the native kings (or chiefs) of Ceylon. 
A few years ago the attempt was made to bring 
this Hon, which weighs many tons, from the ruins 
of the old city down to Colombo. It was so heavy 
the bottom of the wagon fell out, and it seemed 
impossible to move it any farther. Elephants 
were secured and made to understand what was 
needed. They went to work with a will, and 
pulled so hard that they pulled the second wagon 
in two. A third, stouter than the others, was 
prepared, and then it was found that the bridges 
over the rivers were not strong enough, for the 
elephants would put their front feet on each 
bridge, shake it, and then, tossing up their 
trunks, refuse to go forward. A road had to be 
built down the bank of the river and another on 
the opposite side, when the elephants willingly 
enough, and as though they took a real interest 
in the enterprise, pulled the lion through the 
river, up the bank, and out on the other side. It 
is not surprising, therefore, that the Buddhist 
priests who, with their red and yellow robes, 
throng the Maligawa Temple like to have these 
great animals join in the processions during the 
religious festivals when the tooth of Lord Buddha 
is to be carried from the shrine through the 
streets of the capital of Ceylon. 




ELEPHANT AT WORK. 




TEMPLE OF BUDDHA S TOOTH. 



XXIV. 
OCEAN ISLAND. 

A TRAVELER Occasionally meets up with people 
who have had wonderful experiences. On our 
steamer I was introduced to a square-shouldered, 
burly-looking, freckle-faced, red-headed passen- 
ger, who bore the name of Captain Walkup. 
He looked a sailor, every inch of him; but 
he had scarcely spoken before I discovered in 
his hearty grasp of the hand and friendl}^ 
smile that he had a big heart in spite of his 
freckles. He turned out to be the captain of the 
famous Morning Star. This is the well-known 
missionary ship which has sailed and steamed 
among thousands of the little coral islands in 
the South Seas, has carried food, clothes, and 
medicine to many a lonely missionary, and has 
had hairbreadth escapes from hurricanes and — 
what is far more to be dreaded — cannibals. 

It was not long before I got the Captain started 
on the story of his missionary journeyings, and 
soon my interest was centered upon Ocean Is- 
land, 250 miles west of the Gilbert group. A 

(IS9) 



l6o SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

good many years ago a number of islanders were 
driven by a storm upon the shore of this lone 
sentinel, their canoes were wrecked, and they 
were left high and dry for life. Here they re- 
mained almost without clothing, eking out an 
existence by fishing and sheltering themselves 
from the sun under the shadow of the rocks or 
such primitive huts as they were able to build out 
of wreckage and grass, for there were no trees 
on the island. The heat was almost insupporta- 
ble, as they were nearly under the equator. Some- 
times it does not rain for two years, and they 
nearly perished for lack of water, having to be 
very careful of the water that had been collected 
during the rainy season in the hollow of the 
rocks, in caves where it trickled down through 
the earth, or in rude cisterns fashioned with their 
hands and with sharpened sticks or fish bones. 
No people could have been poorer or more mis- 
erable. 

In addition to all this, their wickedness and 
that of white men brought on other troubles. 
They got to drinking and learned the use of fire- 
arms, for both liquor and guns were supplied by 
the whalers who would occasionally visit the 
island. Things went from bad to worse until 
Captain Walkup says almost every child born 
on the island had died : and thousrh the inhabit- 



OCEAN ISLAND. l6l 

ants had multiplied until there were 400, they 
were now rapidly diminishing. Then the Morn- 
ing Star hove in sight, ran up its flag, and offered 
to leave a missionary worker who could not only 
point them to Christ but teach them how to plant 
vegetables, build better houses, and make life 
more tolerable. 

The story of God's love and the mission of 
Jesus Christ to redeem man from his cruelty, sin, 
and shame was so new that it seemed to have 
come straight out of the heavens. The simple 
islanders listened and wondered, and then with 
tears rolling down their cheeks confessed their 
ignorance, their sin, and their need, and accept- 
ed Christ as their Saviour. A wonderful trans- 
formation took place. They fished with more 
diligence, they put on neat cotton shirts which 
the missionaries taught them how to make out 
of cloth brought on the Morning Star, they 
learned to read out of simple little primers made 
for them by their teachers, built a schoolhouse 
and a church, and asked that they might have 
the privilege of supporting their own pastor. 
This I thought was hardly short of marvelous, 
after the Captain told me, with a shrug of his 
shoulders, that they had been in the habit of kill- 
ing every man who drifted on the shore from 
other islands. The v/omen and children were 

TT 



l62 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

saved, if there were any in the canoes, but the 
men were sacrificed. 

And now comes another part of the story, 
which is scarcely less astonishing. The mission- 
aries discovered that what seemed to be a bare 
rock was phosphate of lime, which is very valua- 
ble as a fertilizer. This deposit is over twenty- 
five feet deep, and it was calculated there were 
at least 18,000,000 tons of the phosphate which 
could be mined, shipped, and sold in countries 
far distant, where the soil needed to be enriched. 
It was a mine of wealth. These islanders, who 
for several hundred years had nothing to make 
clothes out of, not enough water to drink, and 
with difficulty caught enough fish to eat, were 
almost as rich as if they had the greatest dia- 
mond mine in the world. The Captain said, with 
a wink of his right eye and a jerk of his thumb 
over his shoulder: ''You will hardly believe it, 
but there is a steamer following us now with 
1,000 tons of that phosphate on board, and she is 
bound for Kobe, Japan." To my surprise, I 
learned that the Japanese Mitsu Bishi Steamship 
Company was sending to those islanders once 
every month a vessel to bring to their own shores 
what is so much needed to enrich their country. 

Ocean Island is now a beehive of activity. 
There are 100. white men and over ^oo natives 



OCEAN ISLAND. 1 63 

brought from the Gilbert Islands who are at work 
in the phosphate beds. x\bout i.ooo tons a day 
are dug up and prepared for shipment. Around 
the little whitewashed cottages there grow flow- 
ers and vines, the latter bearing cucumbers and 
melons of every sOrt. Trees have been planted, 
and by the use of rain water gathered in the 
tanks, which the white men have shown them 
how to build, the whole face of the island is 
being transformed. You may count 130 chil- 
dren with books in hand trudging along every 
day up to the schoolhouse. On Saturday after- 
noon work stops that the laborers may have a lit- 
tle recreation, for this is in the hottest zone of the 
world, and Sunday is a day of absolute rest be- 
cause almost every islander has become a con- 
sistent Christian. This surely is an illustration 
of being lifted by the gospel from darkness into 
light and from heathenism into the life which 
God gives the world through faith in Jesus 
Christ. 

Captain Walkup says that Pleasant Island, far 
to the east, has had a history much the same as 
this one. If anything, the islanders were more 
wicked and cruel. There were only 1,500 people, 
and these were made up of fourteen tribes that 
were at war with each other all the time. The 
island was divided up between these tribes, and 



164 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

a man belonging to one could not cross the line 
into the territory of another. They were con- 
stantly killing each other with clubs set with fish 
teeth, which tore the flesh, or they would pierce 
each other through and through with sharp jave- 
lins made of fish bones hooked at the end. Some 
times captured children were strung together by 
running these long fish bones through their ears, 
and the old people were beaten to death because 
they could not work. 

While walking on the shore one day an Eng- 
lishman, who was an escaped convict and had 
been on the island for forty years, ran out of the 
bushes and urged the Captain to bring some mis- 
sionaries on the Morning Star. He had just lost 
a son, who had been clubbed to death by the sav- 
ages, and he was sick at heart. *T am tired of 
the whole thing," said he, ''and wish you w^ould 
open a Christian school and help these people to 
live a better life." A native teacher was sent 
who remained seven years. He was supported 
by the Union Church in Honolulu, which we 
saw on our way to Japan. The result of his work 
and of others is 700 Church members or 1,000 in 
the Sunday morning congregation gathered in 
the beautiful little church which they have built 
with their own hands. Behold what God hath 
wrought ! 



XXV. 
THE ROOF OF ASIA. 

During our trip from Nashville to San Fran- 
cisco I had occasion to write about "The Roof of 
the Continent/' for the Rockies may be so styled. 
We had no idea at that time that we would have 
the privilege of standing on the ''Roof of Asia," 
which is the highest view point in the world. The 
Himalaya Mountains, which run nearly east and 
west, form the great ridge (or divide) from 
which China slopes to the east, Russia to the 
west, and India to the south. From the melting 
snows of this and kindred ranges rise the Yang-tse 
River, emptying into the Pacific; the Ganges, 
which feeds the Indian Ocean; and the Indus, 
with its mouth in the Bay of Bengal. 

Boarding a train at Calcutta one evening, we 
traveled all that night almost due north, and in 
the morning found ourselves still in the midst of 
rice fields, palm trees, and groves of bananas. At 
9 o'clock, after we had had some breakfast, we 
changed to the "Climber." This is a little train 
traveling on a two-foot track, with cars that seem 
made for play instead of travel, for each passen- 

(165) 



l66 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

ger coach holds from six to eight people only, 
except in the third-class, where they were packed 
like sardines. 

We started off on level ground, and were in- 
clined to poke fun at our little locomotive, which 
fairly seemed to dance along the track, and hard- 
ly took seriously to the fact that it had to pull us 
all day long up mountain sides which would have 
taxed a horse to travel. But it was not long be- 
fore we came to have profound respect for the 
engine and the Scotch engineer, who seemed a 
part of each other. Our car was the second in 
the train, and it was a constant temptation to 
stick our heads out of the windows and see what 
the locomotive was about. It puffed and blew 
and twisted, shaking itself from side to side as 
we zigzagged along and rounded short curves 
until we thought surely we should be landed in 
some deep valley far below ; but it always kept the 
track and constantly climbed higher and higher. 

One of the most interesting points on the road 
is the "Loop." Here the mountain was so steep 
, that, finding it impossible to go on, the engineer so 
constructed the road as to make it pass over itself 
and wind in a spiral around an adjacent hilltop in 
order to get high enough to reach another level in 
the mountains. It made me think of a point on the 
Southern Pacific Railroad in California, between 



THE ROOF OF ASIA. 167 

Los Angeles and San Francisco, where the con- 
structing engineer was at his wit's end, when his 
little boy, who was with him, asked: "Father, 
why don't you make the road cross itself like 
the loop of a string?" He caught the idea at 
once and worked out the problem just as.it has 
been done here. 

From this elevation we looked almost straight 
below us 2,000 feet, where lie the jungles of 
grass, matted vines, ferns, and tropical growth 
in which the deadly cobra is found and the royal 
Bengal tiger still roams at large. It is said that 
a missionary, passing through the jungle on his 
way to a native village, had one of these snakes 
to twist himself into the wheel of his bicycle. 
You may imagine it did not take long for that 
missionary to dismount and get rid of his unwel- 
come companion. In the Zoological Garden at 
Calcutta we saw a magnificent tiger of unusual 
size and strength having his dinner off of a big 
piece of beef. As he crunched the bone between 
his teeth we were glad he was behind the iron 
bars, for we were told that he was a man-eater 
from these very jungles and had disposed of at 
least two hundred men, women, and children. 

As we climb into the region of cloud we find 
ourselves in the midst of tea plantations. From 
the little evergreen shrubs, planted in rows and 



l68 SIDE LIGHTS ON THE ORIENT. 

diagonals, the buds and tender leaves are picked 
by women and children, dried, and shipped from 
Calcutta to England, Europe, and almost every 
part of the world. The farms are on hillsides 
so steep that in many places the tea pickers have 
almost to hold on with one hand while they pick 
with the other. And yet here and there you see 
tiny little thatched huts belonging to the laborers 
that seem to swing in mid-air. While the front 
door is level with the ground, one might toss a 
pebble out of the back window i,ooo feet down 
the mountains. It would be a dangerous place 
for one to live who was in the habit of walking 
in his sleep. It was not far from here that a 
Mrs. Lee and her husband, both missionaries, 
had left their children to go to school while they 
continued their work in Calcutta. The house was 
supposed to be in a secure place, as there was a 
good foundation and a yard of fair size ; but un- 
der the heavy rains which poured down in tor- 
rents during the monsoon (or wet season) there 
was a landslide (or avalanche) which swept down 
with terrific force, burying the house and the in- 
mates under tons of earth and rock. A telegram 
was sent to the parents, who traveled night and 
day, walking miles at a stretch over roads which 
had been torn up by the mountain torrents ; but 
they reached the spot only in time to hear the 



THE ROOF OF ASIA. 169 

oldest boy tell the story before he died. The 
workmen had dug him out, but the others were 
beyond their reach. 

At last we are on the summit of the range 
over which we have been climbing all day. The 
beautiful Kinchinjunga bursts upon our view. It 
soars like a snow palace in the upper clouds 28,- 
156 feet above the level of the sea. The sun is 
setting in the far West and lights up with rosy 
hue each dome and pinnacle until, like some celes- 
tial city let down, it looks as though it were all 
to be lifted up again into the heavens. We saw 
Fujiyama, in Japan, 12,365 feet high. You could 
add a second Fuji, placing it on top of the first, 
making 24,000 feet, and still Kinchinjunga would 
require 4,000 more to measure its height. Not 
one peak alone, but several over 24,000 feet, 
lift up their heads as they tower above the plains 
of India, the table-lands of Tibet, and even the 
roof itself of the great Asiatic continent. And 
Mount Everest is the highest of them all. As we 
gazed and gazed, I could not help repeating to 
myself those beautiful words of David in the 
twenty- fourth Psalm : 

Lift up your heads, O ye gates; 

Even lift them up, ye everlasting doors; 

And the King of glory shall come in. 

Who is this King of glory? 

The Lord of hosts, he is the King of glory. 



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